4 ms·
> Historically software was always low on memory, and subsequently sorting algorithms were developed that bent over backwards in order to use as little addition
by HippoBaro 6y ago
> Historically software was always low on memory, and subsequently sorting algorithms were developed that bent over backwards in order to use as little additional memory as possible. Nowadays most modern systems have several gigabytes of memory that are not used and are just sitting idle.
True, but on these systems, most of the time, users don't care about performance. And when they do, the dataset is not large enough for this kind of algorithms to shine anyway.
- nine_k 6y agoAlso, memory is way slower than the CPU cache(s). So operating within a small subset of the available memory is still beneficial if you need the top performance.
- gridlockd 6y agoThere often is only a narrow range where (data + overhead) is larger than cache, but (data + 0) is smaller than cache. Cached reads/writes arent't free either, so if overhead drastically reduces those, you may come out on top 100% of the time.
- secondcoming 6y agoWho doesn't care about performance? If your browser took 1 minute to start up you'd uninstall it.