[Scottish] Computing Power debate

[Aidan Skinner]

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On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 11:51:33AM +0100, Cameron Logie wrote

> Following on from the debate last night about slow software on high spec
> machines, don't you think that developers of 3 or 4 years ago were,
> perhaps, more prepared to use lower level programming languages to gain
> additional speed ?

Three things:

1. C is /still/ the most used programming language, for god only knows
what reason, and you don't get muhch lower level than semi-portable
asm.

2. High level languages like python can, in theory, be much quicker
than low level languages: http://psyco.sourceforge.net/introduction.html

3. Language choice is totally epsilon compared to algorithim choice,
the difference between C and Python is prolly in the order of 10% at
worst, the difference between a skip list and a linked list is so much
more.

> Maybe another problem is that compiler optimisations aren't being fully
> exploited so that the software can run on any x86 box.
> I wonder what a 686 optimised version of Word would be like, for example.

again, compiler optimisation won't get you anything like the speedup
that proper algorithim choice will.

- Aidan

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