Let Go, Standard Library From Community

[David B. Held]

Daniel Keep wrote:
> [...]
> This is one thing I really lament about my uni education thus far.  Two
> topics that basically have *never* been covered in even minimal detail
> have been optimisation and debugging.
> 
> To be honest, I wouldn't know the most efficient way to return or pass
> out a vector because I've never had any kind of grounding in the effects
> of the various ways of doing it.  For instance: at what point does
> passing by reference become faster than by value?

This is where it really helps to have some understanding of what a 
compiler actually does.  The "Java Syndrome" helps students treat the 
compiler like a magical black box where text goes in and executables 
come out.  While this is useful for cranking out thousands of 
entry-level programmers that assiduously follow design specs, it's not 
very good for creating engineers who are also artists.

If you want to understand pass-by-value vs. pass-by-reference, it helps 
to understand how C works, and then how assembly works.  Only when you 
get an idea for the actual instructions involved and how much time they 
take, relatively speaking, does it become practical to estimate these 
things.  You can never be 100% sure what code a compiler is going to 
generate without looking at the output, but after you learn a few 
languages, you can make pretty good guesses.

For function call performance, you need to understand registers, memory, 
stacks, call frames, and calling conventions.  You also need to 
understand that references are just pointers that get automagically 
dereferenced on use.  Once you put these things together, it starts to 
become fairly clear when one is preferred over the other (though there 
is definitely a gray area where it depends on the actual code generation 
and hardware characteristics).

If you really want to be a good programmer, you need to take your 
education into your own hands.  I would venture to claim that the 
majority of experts in the world learned most of what they know from 
self-study, and not from classroom lectures and textbooks.  You are 
particularly lucky to be alive at this point in time because you have 
ridiculously more free information available to you than I did when I 
was growing up.  I would have killed to have as much of the internet to 
access as you do.

If you are really serious about your education, you will soon find your 
classes boring, because most of your learning will be self-directed. 
But you have to be fairly motivated to engage in that kind of learning, 
and everyone has different personalities.  In the end, a diploma only 
proves that you will jump through hoops for The Man (which is important 
for getting a job in the corporate world, where docility is rewarded and 
innovation is discouraged).

Dave