5 ms·
Think of it like this: the universe doesn't care what we want, or what we find to be clean abstraction. When our programs are run on real, physical hardware the
by moconnor 3y ago
Think of it like this: the universe doesn't care what we want, or what we find to be clean abstraction. When our programs are run on real, physical hardware they will be faced with the physical limits of those systems.
If that means sequential writes are significantly faster than random writes then no amount of OS abstraction will make an application that is structured to require random writes as fast as one that uses sequential ones.
If you don't care about performance, then the abstraction layers we have let you ignore this level of detail already.
- rbanffy 3y ago> If you don't care about performance, then the abstraction layers we have let you ignore this level of detail already. I really care more about correctness, portability, and long-term maintainability. Optimizing for the idiosyncrasies of a given OS at a given point in time go against them all. Performance can often be increased by adding hardware (or waiting for the next Moore iteration). There are a few cases where performance is critical, in the sense that, if you don't achieve it, the system is not fit for purpose, but they are vanishingly rare.