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posted by LaminatorX on Sunday March 16 2014, @03:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the premature-optimization-is-the-root-of-all-evil dept.

Subsentient writes:

"I've been writing C for quite some time, but I never followed good conventions I'm afraid, and I never payed much attention to the optimization tricks of the higher C programmers. Sure, I use const when I can, I use the pointer methods for manual string copying, I even use register for all the good that does with modern compilers, but now, I'm trying to write a C-string handling library for personal use, but I need speed, and I really don't want to use inline ASM. So, I am wondering, what would other Soylenters do to write efficient, pure, standards-compliant C?"

 
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  • (Score: 1) by jackb_guppy on Sunday March 16 2014, @09:22PM

    by jackb_guppy (3560) on Sunday March 16 2014, @09:22PM (#17286)

    I so agree. You have to understand what the compiler and underlying hardware will do.

    One day back in the XT & AT days, we had two young programmers trying to write ASM for simple screen processing. They tried to save as many instructions as possible figuring it was faster. So one instruction was multiple by 80. It looks good. Showed that a Store, 2 shifts, Add, 4 shifts was way faster, but took 8 instructions, instead of 1.