Category: performance

  • On benchmarks

    Numbers every programmer should know and their impact on benchmarks Disclaimer: I don’t mean to be picking on the particular organizations / projects / people who I’ll mention below. They are just examples of a larger trend I observed. Sometimes (most of the times?) we forget just how powerful the machines in our pockets /…

  • Is hand-writing assembly still necessary these days?

    Some time ago I came over the following article: Fast CRC32 in Assembly. It claimed that the assembly implementation was faster than the one implemented in C. Performance was always something I’m interested in, so I repeated and extended the experiment. Here are the numbers I got. This is on a Core 2 Duo T5500…

  • Profile first!

    I was using my code to parse a medium-sized CVS log and it was being slow (~1min). So, like an idiot I said: I know that the algorithm is quite slow, so I optimize it. Here is a version which is twice as fast as the original version: use strict; use warnings; use Test::More tests…

  • Java numerical calculation benchmark

    Update: it seems that the JITting process has improved quite a bit these last years (which is to be expected), and the differences are much smaller (and in some cases in favor of Java). Also, the discussion below is to be understood in the context of trigonometric functions rather than floating point operations in general.…

  • On javascript libraries

    I did a little project for school which included the dojo.gfx library. Here are share some of the conclusions I arrived at. But first a disclaimer: INAJD (I’m Not A Javascript Developer). I dabble with it but I’m not a professional. Now back to our topic: Javascript libraries are huge. After including the dojo toolkit,…