Monday 6 April 2009

Proebstring's Law

An interesting law from Todd Proebsting which I hadn't heard before:

advances in compiler optimizations double computing power every 18 years


Compare this to Moore's Law and it suggests that research into compiler optimization isn't going to get as much say programmer productivity (better tools for writing, analysing and understanding code). This is similar to the arguments made in favour of functional programming languages. It doesn't matter if functional languages are any slower at run-time; the development time improvement means they win overall.

No comments:

Post a Comment