Null references redux

[Jeremie Pelletier]

Yigal Chripun wrote:
> On 29/09/2009 16:41, Jeremie Pelletier wrote:
> 
>> What I argued about was your view on today's software being too big and
>> complex to bother optimize it.
>>
> 
> that is not what I said.
> I was saying that hand optimized code needs to be kept at minimum and 
> only for visible bottlenecks, because the risk of introducing low-level 
> unsafe code is bigger in more complex and bigger software.

What's wrong with taking a risk? If you know what you're doing where is 
the risk, and if now how will you learn? If you write your software 
correctly, you could add countless assembly optimizations and never 
compromise the security of the entire thing, because these optimizations 
are isolated, so if it crashes there you have only a narrow area to 
debug within.

There are some parts where hand optimizing is almost useless, like 
network I/O since latency is already so high having a faster code won't 
make a difference.

And sometimes the optimization doesn't even need assembly, it just 
requires using a different high level construct or a different 
algorithm. The first optimization is to get the most efficient data 
structures with the most efficient algorithms for a given task, and THEN 
if you can't optimize it more you dig into assembly.

People seem to think assembly is something magical and incredibly hard, 
it's not.

Jeremie