[dmd-internals] 5th Biweekly Sprint Planning​

[Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals]

On 09/09/2015 03:20 PM, Martin Nowak via dmd-internals wrote:
> As you can see we're pretty busy already and github is a horrible
> communication path (news/notification driven, spammy...).

Yeah, it's killing me too!

> Also you have to prioritize issues, it's really not that important when
> the hello world size wiggles by a few kB.

That sounds reasonable but I must disagree. For one thing, the wiggling 
is going a lot more often on the increase than on the decrease. There is 
one way to reduce code bloat, and that is measure it and make it easier 
for it to go down than go up. Then you have established a ratchet 
mechanism which will ineluctably push down on bloat. Letting things 
loose means, well, that'll never happen.

On the HHVM team the managers have researched and exploited with immense 
success this ratchet pattern. That team's lore includes anecdotes from 
wildly different domains all telling the same story.

Of obese people who lose weight, 80% gain it back. Who doesn't? Those 
who weigh themselves each day and COMPLETELY FREAK OUT when they see 
half a pound over their target weight. They do ANYTHING IT TAKES to take 
their weight back to where it was.

This story is a legend among the HHVM team because we applied it as 
well: http://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains

That's how we got HHVM from 5x slower to 4x faster than the baseline: by 
working on every percent. And by not letting things wiggle.


Andrei