1. Speed (was: Stupid Newbie-sounding question)
Patrick Barnes wrote:
>
> >From: Matt Lewis <guest at RapidEuphoria.com>
> >
> >I agree that Euphoria is fast enough for *most* things that I like to
> >do with it, however, it wouldn't be if it slowed down (especially by
> >50%). I write a lot of custom optimization code in Euphoria, and it's
> >often right on the edge of being fast enough for some things. If it
> >slowed down, I'd have to stop using Euphoria for these tasks (yes,
> >even running on 3Ghz machines).
>
> Yes, you may think it doesn't matter whether a sub-routine takes 0.01
> seconds or 0.0001...
> But if your program needs to call this subroutine 1000 times at startup,
> then those small differences are magnified 1000-fold.
>
> Algorithmic efficiency is the most important thing now, not so much things=
> like how many bytes a primitive type is stored in (some exceptions), and
> things like the processing time spent in the main portion of the code.
>
Yes, algorithmic efficiency is important (and believe me, I pay a lot of
attention to this issue!), but certain low level optimizations that
Euphoria uses (integer arithmetic) are *very* important. I'm doing these
operations millions of times, and the optimizations that come from the
way that Rob has laid out the data *is* important. A good algorithm can
only go so far.
Matt Lewis
PS Pete, did you notice how I changed the subject? :)
