Refterm Lecture Part 1 - Philosophies of Optimization

What people said

dundarious · 2021-11 · Strong recommendation

Casey Muratori's refterm video series is a great example of how to do application design. It focuses on writing a terminal emulator for Windows, but almost all the concepts apply to nixes as well -- even down to the level of OS primitives like memory mappings to create a ring buffer, etc. He builds a nearly complete terminal that appears to better support unicode and escape sequences than windows-terminal, in drastically less code and with literally orders of magnitude better performance. In particular, I like his focus on experimentation to figure out a reasonable upper bound on performance (so you can measure success/failure), "non-pessimisation" (don't do things extrinsic to the actual task), understanding the actual machine and its capabilities (he doesn't use the term, but sometimes called "mechanical sympathy"), and tactics for isolating "bad code" that you probably have to use (at least to get started). [VIDEO]

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latexr · 2024-11 · Recommendation

> Casey Muratori has a real in-depth course on why Python is slow and how to make it fast I don’t think that’s a fair characterisation of the course and that description does it a disservice. The course is not about Python, it’s about programming with performance in mind. The video on Philosophies of Optimisation is a good primer on the tenets of the course. [VIDEO]

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DeathArrow · 2023-12 · Recommendation

Anything object oriented is slower than anything procedural. Boxing and unboxing is expensive, running constructors and destructors is expensive, copying objects is expensive, virtual tables are expensive. And stuff isn't aligned greatly in memory, we can expect lots of cache misses and branch mispredictions. The fastest possible way is to have C strings in an array and run a function over it. If there are advantages to OOP, speed is not one of them. Here's a great talk about software speed: [VIDEO]

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