3 ms·
Very interesting, although we are (sadly) past the point where squeezing every byte you can get out of your program matters.
by selven 17y ago
Very interesting, although we are (sadly) past the point where squeezing every byte you can get out of your program matters.
- kelnos 17y agoI think crazy size optimization like that is a fun exercise, but I completely disagree with your "sadly" there. Avoiding the need to do all this silly micro-optimization means more time to create things that people actually care about and want to use. Yes, modern software is comparatively huge and bloated, but the less your average programmer has to worry about code size and speed, the larger the the body of useful applications we'll have.
- willchang 17y agoNostalgia is surely as bad a vice as they come, but I can't help be a little nostalgic that marvelous hacks like these no longer have a place in our world. I've heard there are similar such hacks in the world microbiology, overlapping genes giving bacteria a selective advantage. But in the world of people, genomic code bloat is apparently not a problem.
- jacquesm 17y agoThat must be one of the reasons why a stock install of a basic os takes up a gig or more of harddrive space and a similar amount of ram ? If you want to see absolutely blistering speed try installing a 10 year old linux distro with X on it.
- petewarden 17y agoI don't know, it's only last year I was trying to squeeze a pixel shader down to 64 ARB_fragment_program instructions to fit on older ATI cards. The cycle of hardware reincarnation keeps giving me reasons to dust off the 8 bit skills. Writing for cell phones or even JavaScript environments often feels like old times.