4 ms·

I'll bet that sort of 10x programming has gotten rarer simply because hardware constraints have relaxed so much. Tricks that once would have made a program poss

I'll bet that sort of 10x programming has gotten rarer simply because hardware constraints have relaxed so much. Tricks that once would have made a program possible now just make it a headache to read. An awful lot of game-development history was spent actively looking for 'clever' hacks that would verge on fireable offenses today. Pokemon Red was made barely-possible via the sorts of magic-number tricks most of us don't even like to think about, but at this point that sort hand-optimization is basically just code golf for its own sake.

nostrademons 7y ago
It moves generationally, as new platforms are invented and people seek to capitalize on the platform before the performance is really all there. When you're doing anything at the bleeding edge, you really need to know the details of the platform and squeeze every ounce of performance out of it, because there's probably not enough performance to go around. When the edge moves to the center, stops bleeding, and the platform gets optimized, those sorts of hacks become silly anachronisms. I remember doing Javascript games in 2007 (before V8 introduced a JIT to JS) and very carefully optimizing loops, avoiding DOM calls, eschewing JQuery, etc. to get acceptable performance. As late as 2009 we were counting bytes on the Google search results page (like literally; we'd do things like "for(var i=0,e; e=c[i++];)" to save a byte in a foreach loop). Solidity programmers on the Ethereum VM today use tricks like switching out opcodes and moving functionality into library contracts, sometimes at the expense of locking tens of millions of dollars worth of ETH forever. Nobody counts bytes or manually moves common subexpressions out of loops in JS today; you just use Babel. But as computing matures, the bottleneck moves, and people seek out new domains that are just becoming possible, and then have to develop a new bag of tricks.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

nostrademons 7y ago

It moves generationally, as new platforms are invented and people seek to capitalize on the platform before the performance is really all there. When you're doing anything at the bleeding edge, you really need to know the details of the platform and squeeze every ounce of performance out of it, because there's probably not enough performance to go around. When the edge moves to the center, stops bleeding, and the platform gets optimized, those sorts of hacks become silly anachronisms. I remember doing Javascript games in 2007 (before V8 introduced a JIT to JS) and very carefully optimizing loops, avoiding DOM calls, eschewing JQuery, etc. to get acceptable performance. As late as 2009 we were counting bytes on the Google search results page (like literally; we'd do things like "for(var i=0,e; e=c[i++];)" to save a byte in a foreach loop). Solidity programmers on the Ethereum VM today use tricks like switching out opcodes and moving functionality into library contracts, sometimes at the expense of locking tens of millions of dollars worth of ETH forever. Nobody counts bytes or manually moves common subexpressions out of loops in JS today; you just use Babel. But as computing matures, the bottleneck moves, and people seek out new domains that are just becoming possible, and then have to develop a new bag of tricks.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]