A note for those not consumed by efficiency worries

[Henry Spencer]

In article <1084 at targon.UUCP> ruud at targon.UUCP (Ruud Harmsen) writes:
>If in the design of a programme or system you totally disregard all
>performance issues, you might have to rebuild large parts from scratch,
>and/or make the whole thing totally incomprehensible when optimisizing.

If you are seriously bent on high performance, however, you *will* have
to rebuild significant parts from scratch, possibly several times.  Humans
simply cannot predict bottlenecks well enough to provide for them ahead
of time, and one gets much more mileage out of rethinking and reimplementing
code than out of tweaking it.  There are parts of C News that have been
reimplemented five or six times.
-- 
"Apparently IBM is not IBM    |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
compatible." -Andy Tanenbaum  | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu