Efficiency

[jdu@sasd1.att.com (John D Unruh +1 708 979 6765)]

>Writing efficient code could really be a difficult problem, and requires a
>deep understanding of the problem at hand. Often much more speed-up is
>gained by rewriting, using entirely different algorithms and
>datastructures, rather than merely fine-tuning a piece of code.
>
>What could make quite a practical difference though between languages, is
>the quality of profiling tools in the development environment, that will
>allow one to quickly determine where all that time is being burned up.
>
>Markus Krummenacker
>
>

It can also be important to understand what is fast and what is slow in
a given language implementation.  The underlying hardware can also make
a big difference.  For example, the presence or absence of floating point
HW, frequent switched between PowerMac native and 68000 emulation, the
ability of the compiler to do tail recursion elimination, etc can all make
a big difference.

John Unruh