Best hack: Rewriting a C++ matrix library to change its API back in 1996/1997, for a 100x speedup. It was a nice library... It had things like a = b + c; ...

Best hack: Rewriting a C++ matrix library to change its API back in 1996/1997, for a 100x speedup. It was a nice library... It had things like a = b + c; ... but back then, C++ really didn't have tools to support that syntax with great performance. Especially mixed with a bad allocator, that prevented multi-threaded allocation.