Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!athene!pcg From: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Aggressive optimization Message-ID: Date: 8 Nov 90 16:43:22 GMT References: <1932@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> <2303:Nov607:26:0890@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <2213@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> <6850:Nov620:39:1390@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> Sender: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 22 Nntp-Posting-Host: odin In-reply-to: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu's message of 6 Nov 90 20:39:13 GMT On 6 Nov 90 20:39:13 GMT, brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) said: brnstnd> And the bugs keep coming, and coming, and coming, and coming brnstnd> ... I think we've successfully reduced this argument to a brnstnd> simple question: ``Do optimizers gain more speed than they lose brnstnd> reliability?'' Again, I'm firmly convinced that heavy brnstnd> optimizations are on the latter side. It's pretty clear that brnstnd> you are on the former side. In any case I think the argument is brnstnd> finished. Not so easily: the argument is also: are the alternatives at least in way of principle as effective and safer? Because if aggressive optimization were the only alternative, we would only have choice between more speed and less reliability or less speed and more reliability, and more speed can often mean a lot, and many people do not care about reliability (e.g. the quoted bloat in vmunix, GNU Emacs, etc...). But there are alternatives. -- Piercarlo Grandi | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk