[9fans] Re: Clean Code & Performance

[Jack Johnson <fragment@nas.com>]

rob pike, esq. wrote:
> But to get those
> 10% tweaks everybody fusses over, to the detriment of just about
> everything in computing, you need to tune and tune and fuss and tweak
> and hack, and that does not leave you with clean code.

There's this interesting harmonic convergence in the stuff I've been
reading lately, and I just thought I'd share.

There's some interesting stuff going on with the Squeak VM in regards to
performance, and in general people are happy with the performance
improvements, but there has been a lot of discussion about what it takes
to eke out another 10%, and how much of it can hurt keeping the system
clean and straightforward.

Because some of the Squeakers see strong similarities in
Squeak/Smalltalk and Forth, there has been some discussion about
rewriting the VM in Forth to get closer to the machine.

Chuck Moore, Forth's creator, talks a *lot* about how he feels good
Forth is nearly non-portable, because if you're really that close to the
metal you're taking advantage of that particular platform's
optimizations and using them to your advantage.  His feeling seems to be
that (in his environment) if you're knowledgeable about the problem then
the coding is, relatively speaking, the easy part, that the solution is
the portable part and not necessarily the code.

I just find it interesting that in this third yet-unrelated thread we
have this discussion of cleanliness/portability vs. performance, and how
often they're at odds with each other.  But, as Rob points out, there
are different ways to measure performance, and something invaluable I
always take away from the discussions here is how a simple solution can
often be much more effective than a hard-number performance improvement.

But, I'm rambling again.  Nothing worse than newbies rambling.

Hopefully you've taken the time to just filter me out.

-Jack