The United States debatably has the most athletic population of an country and its the top sport in America where we funnel all of our talent (probably to our detriment). Regardless of the popularity abroad its where our athletes go.
When we do compete in other sports we fair above average to exceptional (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-time_Olympic_Games_medal_t...) with the notable exception of soccer, which we've never broken through despite investment and a decent population of players.
Don't kid yourself, just because other countries don't play American Football doesn't mean the players aren't freak athletes - they are
It’s not the #1 sport there, but NFL football is popular in Canada too. To me, it’s dominance in North America is enough to qualify but I respect your position.
So some CPU models wait 120 cycles and others wait a millisecond (millions of cycles)? That seems like a pretty drastic difference. I wonder why they would write code with such a drastic difference between CPU models.
The nice thing about compiler optimizations is that you can improve performance of existing CPU's without physically touching them. Year by year. You squeeze more of the machine someone designed. It adds up.
Imagine what environmental impact you would have if you optimized Python's performance by 1%? How much CO2 are you removing from the atmosphere? It's likely to overshadow the environmental footprint of you, your family and all your friends combined. Hell, maybe it's the entire city you live in. All because someone spent time implementing a few bitwise tricks.
> Imagine what environmental impact you would have if you optimized Python's performance by 1%?
I imagine this would also increase the complexity of the python intepreter by more than 1%, which in turn would increase the number of bugs in the interpreter by more than 1%. Which would burn both manpower and CPU-Cycles on a global scale.
(I assume that optimization, that reduce complexity are already exhausted, e.g. stuff like "removing redundant function calls". )
This is an assumption that a reasonable person naively comes up with.
Then if you actually go ahead and check, it turns out it's not true! It's quite a shocking revelation.
When you dig into the popular compilers/runtimes (with the exception of things like LLVM)
Many of them still have low hanging fruit of the form:
a = b + c - b
Yes, the above is still not fully optimized in the official implementations of some popular programming languages.
Also an optimization of "removing redundant function calls" isn't a binary on/off switch. You can do it better or worse. Sometimes you can remove them, sometimes not. If you improve your analysis, you can do more of that and improve performance. Same for DSE, CSE, etc...
In many languages, you can't just optimize + b - b willy-nilly, as there could be side effects and non-obvious interactions abound. For instance, in JavaScript, where everything is a 64-bit double, a + b - b is definitely not the same as a, given large enough or small enough a or b. In LLVM for floats as well, certainly.
It's an example of how trivial some of this low hanging fruit is, the above is a concrete case that I have personally implemented (arithmetic of in-register 64/32-bit integers). You can get into semantics and restrictions, but I think the point I'm raising is clear.
You can shrink it further by doing xorl reg, reg. On x86, the upper 32 bits are cleared for you when using 32 bit opcodes. No need to do a 64-bit reg, reg xor.
Instead of doing cmp $0, %eax, you can use test eax, eax - that's another low hanging fruit.
It seems that you could also preset a dedicated reg to 0 and another to 1, further shaving a few bytes.
Thanks for the suggestions! I'll definitely look into those. I'd been hoping posting on HN would result in being able to shave off yet a few more bytes.
There doesn't seem to be a good in-depth academic resource for advanced compiler optimization. I've searched a lot and all the courses I found were introductory, the actual interesting techniques require diving deep into the source code of popular OSS compilers. I found that quite surprising.
It is possible that he did, but that his brain did not compel him to give it politically spicy prompts. However, I think that should be expected from a general audience. I am more curious of who they used as a test group to give this a once-over and a "looks good to me". There is no way it was representative of a wide public consumer base.
With all the spyware there is on a company’s laptop nowadays I wouldn’t even dare to think about querying such questions in an internal-only version of the AI.
Screw a test group, a test department, called QA, people who are paid to understand the system and how it works enough to evaluate if it's fully working or not and empowered to stop ship when it's catastrophically not working.
Maybe the wise choice is to change the path? That feeling of resignation, while a bitter pill to swallow, might be a good thing in the end. I used to beat myself over for not working hard and dedicating myself to my ideas, yet a few years down the line it became obvious the startups I wanted to build would have been made obsolete by other tech. I've dodged a few wasted years, a burnout or straight-up insanity right there. Trust your gut.
Why do something you are not enjoying? Life is short, it might end faster than you think. The people close to you can also disappear sooner than you think. Try to make the most of it. It's not all about making it big and being successful/rich.
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