Compiler Optimizations are Awesome
&gt; If an optimizing compiler can speed up code by, for example, 50%, then suddenly we need to optimize a lot less code by hand.<p>This doesn&#x27;t follow at all. If you had one hot loop and a bunch of cold code, and auto-optimize your code to be a measly factor of 2 faster, you&#x27;re still going to need to hand-optimize the hot loop and what it does to the cold code is irrelevant.<p>&gt; hand-optimized code has higher ongoing maintenance costs than does portable source code; we’d like to avoid it when there’s a better way to meet our performance goals.<p>True, but again, only applies if you can optimize by enough to make hand-optimization unnecessary.<p>&gt; we’d also have to throw away many of those 16 GB phones that are cheap and plentiful and fairly useful today.<p>This part is nonsense. No-one&#x27;s got anything like 16GB of <i>code</i> on their phone.<p>Optimization could be valuable but current compilers are too opaque, making optimization too much of a black art. I believe we need to do something along the lines of &quot;turning the database inside out&quot; ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.confluent.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.confluent.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;turning-the-database-inside-ou...</a> ); we should turn the compiler inside out, build it as more of a library, give the developer more insight into what&#x27;s going on, have a high level language that lets you understand how it compiles. Interesting and vaguely along the same lines: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;research&#x2F;publication&#x2F;coq-worlds-best-macro-assembler&#x2F;?from=http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nick/coqasm.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;research&#x2F;publication&#x2F;coq-wor...</a> .