Tag: performance
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Iterative development
It can be useful to develop in a series of small steps. At each point trying to write the code that you need but not too much more. Building a huge library that you think you’ll need might be a waste of time but building something small that lets you simplify you current code is…
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Time complexity
If you’ve had a university education in software engineering you have probably come across algorithmic time complexity. This classifies algorithms by how long they take to run given an known amount of input, normally written using big O notation. Picking an algorithm with a good time complexity can make an enormous difference to the performance…
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Data-oriented design
I read Data-Oriented Design by Richard Fabian but will mostly cover the methodology (DoD) not the book. Let’s get it out of the way and I’ll try not to belabour it: It’s about all the data Data-oriented design concentrates on the underlying data in any given system. Data tends to be stored in a very…
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Algorithms are great, minimax
There are problems that are hard to solve. There are problems that are easy to solve if you don’t care about speed. At university the algorithms course was one of my favourites. Finding the right algorithm can mean being able to solve the problem much faster. Maybe you’ll have to discover it yourself but there…
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Benchmarking tool
I’ve written before about when and how to optimise code. I think there are often more important aspects to a project than code performance. Servers, desktops, laptops and even new mobile phones are many times more powerful than an old computer. Instead you need to decide whether the performance is good enough. That could be…
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Historic programming style
While researching one of my recent post I came across a reference to The Elements of Programming Style. It’s a study of programming style and it was first published 50 year ago. My dad recognised the book and he remembers when you had to make programs using punched cards! Despite it’s age a lot of…
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400,000,000 times faster (again)
I realised that my previous post talks more about what you should do and less about why you should do it. I’ll try to rectify that. For me the important ideas were: I don’t think the first point is in question. The original python code for this problem may have been terrible. It’s not surprising…
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400,000,000 times faster
Matt Parker is a mathematician and comedian who writes books, makes podcasts and post YouTube videos. He originally release a podcast and then a video to solve a Wordl inspired problem. I’m going to concentrate on his follow up video. You can watch the videos but I’m going to start with a summary. The Wordl…