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The proof of Proebsting's Law seems kind of silly because running a compiler with optimizations turned off wouldn't actually disable all the years of advancemen
by drewp 18y ago
The proof of Proebsting's Law seems kind of silly because running a compiler with optimizations turned off wouldn't actually disable all the years of advancements of compiler technology. It seems quite reasonable that many compiler advancements have to be added at the same time as hardware support. That doesn't make them purely hardware contributions.
Also, the proof skips more than a few critical steps when it says "Let's assume that this ratio is about 4X" and then uses that number as a multiplier in the answer.
- silentbicycle 18y agoI agree that the proof is pretty much handwaving, actually, but I still think their underlying conclusion is valid: Our efforts into optimizing languages should focus on making programmers more efficient, before hardware. (In other words, programmer time is almost always more expensive than processor time.) Also, I think most things in computing called X's Law are not entirely serious, these days.