Comment by xwolfi
3 years ago
Depends of the level of maturity of the system. I d agree you need to be a C genius to accelerate the linux kernel a bit, maybe.
But most software aren't the linux kernel, they're small systems solving a class of specific problems as fast as possible with rotating teams, so it sometimes is just a matter of profiling this stupid hashcode function or asking why the mouse is freezing during high trading volume on the C# GUI :D
You wouldnt believe how common optimization problems are and are not related to GC, a belief I have to disprove very often (look 300ms of GC a day, but hey, you're checking an unindexed table each calculation for a trivial non essential decision, what if we fix it)
Agreed. I once "optimised" an in-house software that took minutes to process a single report, down to seconds, just by adding an index to the database (Microsoft Access, mind you) table. Not all developers know what they are doing [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339
Had a coworker that just indexed everything, and it worked too.
To be fair knowing what to index is hard [1], but one would at least expect a developer to know that indexes are a thing.
[1] https://use-the-index-luke.com/3-minute-test