Great post. If you want to dig in even deeper you can learn certain nuances of underlying assembly language like loop unrolling, reducing the number of memory a

Great post. If you want to dig in even deeper you can learn certain nuances of underlying assembly language like loop unrolling, reducing the number of memory accesses, number of branch instructions per iteration of any loops by rewriting the loop, rearranging instructions or register usage to reduce the dependencies between instructions. I took a CPSC course last year and for one of the labs we improved the performance of fread and fwrite C library calls by playing with the underlying assembly. We maintained a leader board with the fastest times achieved and it was a lot of fun to gain insight into the low level mechanics of system calls. I digged up the link to the lab description - http://www.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca/~cs261/2013w2/labs/lab4.html http://www.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca/~cs261/2013w2/labs/lab4.html