Post #2907500
2026-02-10 13:26 UTC
@aparrish@friend.camp @drj@typo.social
I used to work for a tiny company that made dev tools. One of the more fun things I did there was to make a bit of a compiler runtime faster on a particular microcontroller.
I started by writing it in C with a mostly non-optimizing compiler, figuring I'd tweak the resulting assembly code by hand. I ended up being able to get very good assembly code just by tweaking the C source (and also a C extension that let me pick registers).
Replies (1)
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@suetanvil@freeradical.zone 2026-02-10 13:33
@aparrish@friend.camp @drj@typo.social HLLs give you a huge performance advantage in that they make it much easier to think at the algorithmic level before you look at actual machine ops. (My formative years were spent around assembly nerds and discovering the power of HLLs was a huge revelation to me. But it's still valuable to know this stuff.)