Re: [stella] A warning to newbies -- every cycle becomes sacred!

Subject: Re: [stella] A warning to newbies -- every cycle becomes sacred!
From: Ruffin Bailey <rufbo1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 07 May 2003 20:06:46 -0400
Not that it's necessarily the right thing to do in your particular
application, but I'd chalk it up to a matter of style rather than a
clear-cut right or wrong situation.

Absolutely. My post was simply to point out that I was thinking about ludicrously small optimizations in an arena where you're least likely to be concerned about such a thing, rather than which answer ultimately is "correct". Sure, were my app's success measured in frames per second I might worry about something like this... but then you'd be using C or asm anyhow, much more than likely.


VB, Java, .NET and friends all sacrifice (if you'll forgive the oversimplification) speed for ease of programming and program maintenance. COM is a perfect example -- I've seen a couple of suites I work with go from "pure code" to easily reused objects in a COM architecture. But in both circumstances the hardware available didn't provide similar "eyeball" performance in the new COM-based product compared to the old C-based for four years or so. VB6, particularly VB as glue between COM objects, absolutely isn't a place where speed is goal number one.

At the same time I think Mark's point is on the money -- there are certainly people who are too liberal in coding style, and will overuse objects in place of smart code and, more importantly, *smart coding practices*. People who understand the value of simply thinking about whether comparing err.number to 0 and then potentially taking a branch versus setting to 0 each time are more likely (if you ask me) to design software that at a macro level will be just as frugal and carefully constructed. People who don't understand how to conserve and program elegantly certainly make slow, crappy code. I've seen it over and over (and probably guilty of it as well a few times!). And as Mark pointed out, where you've got bits-a-plenty, cycles do start becoming awfully sacred.

I would love to hear of 6502 asm/2600 programming forming part of a comp sci cirriculum. I don't know what good working with all the registers and instructions you'll find in a modern-day x86 chip really does for the future .NET programmers of the world (C programmers, again, a different story). I even made a quick pitch to O'Reilly about making a book that covered the subject (in which case I finally would have to write a game! Woohoo!). The lessons I learned when I actually tried making a demo or two for the 2600 have served me right well once I entered the workplace of zeroes and ones (no formal training, unless you count a Pascal course in high school).

At any rate, sorry to get long-winded, but just wanted to say, "Watch out newbies; crack open dasm and you might just learn something!"

Ruffin Bailey


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