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From: Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Baby X is bor nagain
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 20:17:25 +0100
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 17/06/2024 17:21, David Brown wrote:
> On 17/06/2024 17:48, Malcolm McLean wrote:
>> 
> Using C without optimisation is like driving a car but refusing to go 
> out of first gear.  You would probably have been better off with a 
> bicycle or driving a tank, according to the task at hand.
> 
I drive C in first gear when I'm developing, which means that the car is 
given instructions to go to the right place and obey all, the rules of 
the road. But it never gets out of frst gear when I'm driving it. 
However because of the nature of what we do, which is interactivce 
programming mostly, usually "just noticeable" time is sufficient. It's a 
bit like driving in London - a top of the range sports car is no better 
than a beat up old mini, they travel at the same speed because of all 
the interactions.

They I had it over to the deployment team, and they take the restraints 
off, and allow it to go up to top gear, and it is compiled with full 
optimisation. And I don't actually have a computer with one of the most 
important hardware targets, but it's all written in C++, a bit in C, and 
none in assembler. So I can't profile it, and I have to rely on insight 
into where the inner loop will be, and how to avoid expensive operations 
in the inner loop.

And hopefully those subroutines will be called for many years to come, 
or hardware as yet un-designed.

With Baby X, I did have severe problems with the rendering speed on an 
old Windows machine. But I haven;t noticed them now its runnng on the 
Apple Mac. However as the name suggests, Baby X was first designed for X 
lib. I only added Windows support later, and all the rgba buffers were 
in the wrong format. But faster processors cover a multitude of sins, if 
you keep things lean.

-- 
Check out my hobby project.
http://malcolmmclean.github.io/babyxrc