Re: While we're at it

I agree, a very good paper worth reading more than once.
However I can't resist adding a couple of more stories, thoughts on
the subject of optimization.
There once was a processor from att that had strlen as a single
opcode, one complex instruction.  It was convenient but it turned out
to actually a little slower, in the real world, than test increment
loop with simple instructions. (also a cics rics comparison on the
same cpu !). The problem was interrupts.  It took too long to save all
that state and restart the instruction and it had to be interruptible.
Point being you have to profile to know whats faster.
The other experience I  had was with an early version of AIX.  Being
curious and not wanting to do the work my boss wanted done I did some
test with disk IO.  I tested clib stdio, read write system calls(page
size),  and mmap. To my surprise stdio won every time.  Apparently the
people at IBM knew more than I did.  The point here is that if you are
not intimately acquainted with all the features and quirks of a
system,
just keep it simple and of course profile.