> I've heard people wax poetic about programming old, limited-memory machines. I wouldn't know anything about those---at the time they were current, I was writing rudimentary number-guessing games in BASIC. But doing this competition entry gave me a taste of what they might be talking about.
One rather big difference here though, the limitation is on the size of the code, not the compiled binary. Most of the "optimizations" here have little to no effect on the code after it's compiled.
With older computers, instead of removing line breaks from the code, you're doing things like tweaking compiler flags to shrink the size.
I think he meant for competitions that judge binary size. Handwritten assembly could even increase the size (like unfolding loops) and it wouldn't matter if the speed was improved.
One rather big difference here though, the limitation is on the size of the code, not the compiled binary. Most of the "optimizations" here have little to no effect on the code after it's compiled.
With older computers, instead of removing line breaks from the code, you're doing things like tweaking compiler flags to shrink the size.