Re: Expensive op codes

[Jim Langston <jlangston@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I would make the general observation that in your libraries (general purpose
procedures) I would tend to sacrifice legibility for speed and performance,
but I would also tend to highly comment them more so than normal code.

I have worked on libraries for other languages, and the types of things you
put into libraries tend to be a bit convoluted anyway, and saving even a very
little bit in a library call can save a substantial time in a program that calls
your procedure or function numerous times.

So I would tend to optimize the heck out of the procedures in there, so they
usually weren't understandable, but then comment exactly what I was doing,
as comments don't increase anything in the final product.

In my programs, though, I would tend to go the other route and make them
as legible and self documenting as I could, as long as there wasn't a 
significant
reduction in execution time.

Regards,

Jim Langston

bmorris@ca.ibm.com wrote:

> [SNIP]

> If you are writing a general-purpose procedure that will be called by every
> application you write, I think you have the responsibility to spend a bit of
> extra time to at least consider performance.  When you write the same code
> inline, you know whether it's performance critical at the time you write it, 
>so
> you can discount performance in some cases.  But when you write a
> general-purpose function, you should write it as though it's going to be 
>called
> in performance-critical situations, because it probably IS going to be.

[SNIP]

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