Re: ideas
Alan Cox (alan@cymru.net)
Fri, 10 May 1996 15:50:04 +0100 (BST)
> Let me tell you a story. In the early days of Excel, Apple made some
> changes to MacOS that caused the one existing version of Excel to crash.
> Microsoft didn't want to make a crucial change to one of their
> procedures because it added 12 clock cycles to the function, and it was
> a heavily used function. In their 3-hour Excel stress test, that
> function was called 76,000 times. Some programmer went ahead and made
> the change, just to see how much slower the new version would be. It
> was about .1 seconds slower on that 3 hour stress test. The change was
> left in.
We arent talking some silly change in unknown code. We are talking about
putting lots of conditional branches (bad for performance on modern CPU's
and lots of messages in code that works).
Alan