Speed (was: Stupid Newbie-sounding question)
- Posted by Matt Lewis <matthewwalkerlewis at yahoo.com> Jun 02, 2004
- 467 views
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? :)