> Run speed is objective and measurable Unfortunately in most modern OSes run speed on x86 is variable and profiling itself is intrusive. You might be able to

> Run speed is objective and measurable Unfortunately in most modern OSes run speed on x86 is variable and profiling itself is intrusive. You might be able to get a general trendline toward a faster algorithm but it'll still be lost in statistical noise. The second problem is that the underlying processor is a moving target. The x86 programming model doesn't directly map to hardware anymore, with out of order execution, branch predictors and register renaming. One variant of the processor with a particular caching algorithm might have totally different results than the next.