3 ms·
this particular stack - bchs - sounds great in a world where the following never happened: 1) transistor density and memory cost never advanced past what they
by lenerdenator 3y ago
this particular stack - bchs - sounds great in a world where the following never happened:
1) transistor density and memory cost never advanced past what they were in 2000
2) no one ever took the Linux kernel project seriously
Your second to last sentence validates this: Cycles are computing power, and power is cheap. It gets cheaper every day. The person who can write flawless C code, including the boilerplate, is expensive.
- binary132 3y agoAt scale a few % efficiency can make a big difference.
- giantrobot 3y agoAt the scale where the savings is meaningful, like millions of dollars meaningful, you should be able to afford a million dollars of efficiency refactors. You need to make a product that is fast/efficient enough to do the job. It needs to be delivered on a schedule that is probably really stupid from an engineering point of view. Efficiency can be patched over by throwing extra resources at the problem (up to a point). Functionality and market timing can't be patched over in the same way. I think it makes sense to throw resources at inefficient code to get yourself into a position where that efficiency has a meaningful consequence. Customers aren't buying your product/service based on the number of instructions or memory used to do a task.
- binary132 3y agoI’m not taking an issue with “prioritize time to market”. I’m taking an issue with “processor cycles and memory are actually meaningless now compared to engineering hours”. That is simply not always true.