3 ms·

I mean are we talking about like optimized C here? Or are we talking about a fast-ish language with more like the flexibility of JavaScript but a bit better per

• kazinator 1y ago
  We are talking about hardware. How recent is this supposed "modern" time when it became faster to go to the next cell of an array rather than chase a pointer (in the best hand-written machine code to do either).
  • dragontamer 1y ago
    30, 20, 10 years ago. Or never. Linux continues to use RB Trees for a huge number of its processing. Because its faster to keep a tree sorted than to sort arrays. You talk as if linked data-structures are inferior or something. Rather than different. Now yes, linked data-structures get relatively worse when latency remains the same but CPU GHz gets faster, but then the reverse is true when cache sizes get larger. L3 caches are now 192MBs on some processors, while Intel consistently has been pushing 1MB+ L2 caches with full load/store bandwidth per core. There is a time and place for all techniques. Including linked data-structures / cons / list-processing.
    • kazinator 1y ago
      On the contrary, I'm simply questioning the idea that we should all be switching to vectors and abandoning list structures, because of "modern" machines. Every other tech bro blowhard likes to repeat this. So, first of all, I want to know what they mean by "modern"---how recently was it supposedly okay to chase pointers rather than just offsets.