Hi Rich,

"Richard Clark" wrote in message
...
I skipped this groaner the first time through. You could program in
almost any language to the same speed of performance if you simply
focused on the 5% bottleneck and coded it in assembler.

Good point, although in the case of highly sophisticated CPUs (superscalar,
VLIW, etc.), the difficulty in getting all the cache and register access
scheduling optimal is difficult enough that there are typically very few
people who can consistently do better in assembly than a high level language
with an optimizer.

In many cases selecting a better algorithm might buy one a lot more!

I love "religious wars" over languages and algorithms!!!

grin

Warmest regards,
John

"Richard Clark" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 25 Apr 2005 17:47:55 -0700, "Joel Kolstad"
wrote:

- C produces the fastest programs

There is some truth to this, perhaps if only because so much more work (as
far
as I can tell) has been done on C optimiziers than for other languages.
Perhaps a better statement would be, "With novice programmers, C tends to
produce the fastest programs."

Hi Joel,

I skipped this groaner the first time through. You could program in
almost any language to the same speed of performance if you simply
focused on the 5% bottleneck and coded it in assembler. Nearly every
"optimizer" consists of saving a lazy programmer's bacon when they
sloppily write poor control structures and assignment statements. It
should be called a de-babelizer.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005 08:35:35 -0700, "Joel Kolstad"
wrote:

Good point, although in the case of highly sophisticated CPUs (superscalar,
VLIW, etc.), the difficulty in getting all the cache and register access
scheduling optimal is difficult enough that there are typically very few
people who can consistently do better in assembly than a high level language
with an optimizer.

In many cases selecting a better algorithm might buy one a lot more!

Hi Joel,

Almost every performance gain you describe is hardware limited - not
software limited. If you can conspire to make every reference call a
cache hit, you win, but 99.999% of the applications used by everyone
here (including antenna modeling) fail in that one regard and stumble
over the rest of the "optimizations." When I look at my performance
monitor, it is idling along at 0 to 2% usage as I type (no surprise).

When I pull up a page from the New York Times (before I set my
firewall filters to turn off advertising) it would peg at 100% ad
infinitum (I guess there's an ironic pun in that). I dare say that no
one is using optimized code for running Nike ads - or if they are,
that it makes any appreciable difference at 2GHz (with a memory access
running at, what, 10% of that?). What HAS been optimized is the data
compression schemes that make up for sloppy code (the problem is
undoubtedly a memory leak or a failed garbage collection routine).

In a sense, I used client side optimization to kill the advertising
stream.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005 08:45:36 -0700, "John Smith"
wrote:
I love "religious wars" over languages and algorithms!!!

Hi Brett,

Well, I've programmed in them all from binary to AI - so that makes me
an agnostic.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC

Richard:

Hmmm, an agnostic huh? EXCELLENT!!!
I will expect no "religious wars" from you on languages! grin

Warmest regards,
John

"Richard Clark" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 26 Apr 2005 08:45:36 -0700, "John Smith"
wrote:
I love "religious wars" over languages and algorithms!!!

Hi Brett,

Well, I've programmed in them all from binary to AI - so that makes me
an agnostic.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC