thingsiplay comments on What's the point of lightweight code with modern computers?

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 8 points 11 months ago (3 children)

The fastest code is the code you don't run.

Not really. The code can be slow, even if I do not run it. Also, sometimes additional code can do optimization (like caching), which is more code = faster. Or additional libraries, complexity and code paths can in example add multicore execution, which could speed up. So, I do not buy the less code is faster logic.

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[–] voytrekk@sopuli.xyz 9 points 11 months ago (1 child)

I think it really depends on what your code is doing. I do agree that less isn't always faster or as they mentioned in the post, safer. Taking a raw input is fast, but not very safe for a variety of reasons. I personally make "simple to understand" as the highest priority for my code.

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[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 3 points 11 months ago

On a slightly different example, the suckless project has a huge emphasizes on lightweight code, which they call "suckless". I don't think in this case faster is the goal, but having less code and be simple as possible (not even configuration files allowed, you just recompile program) and almost no documentation in the code either. But the idea is the same, of having "lightweight" code.

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[–] Malgas@beehaw.org 8 points 11 months ago

I think the most obvious example is loop unrolling. An unrolled loop can be many times more code, but runs faster because you're not updating a counter or doing conditional jumps.

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