alt Hacker NewsLoop unrolling is a basic compiler optimization and depending on the machine language and processor instruction set should be faster taking into account all the house keeping required to execute a conditional, jump, move register values etc. This article is missing the analysis of why. If someone didn’t “like” it and was offended then that seems like an equally silly reason. On the surface 256k to init less does seem silly, but what if it was faster?
A few things to consider.
In this case we're talking about a tight initialization loop with probably a single instruction in the body. The HW optimizations necessary to make a loop like this perform equally to the unrolled form are so rudimentary that they're taken for granted on basically any CPU, even 30 years ago. Seriously, we're talking about optimizations I made in an "intro to Verilog" class as an undergrad, and I'm not even a HW engineer.
It also depends how often this code is being hit. Does the code run once while the program loads? Nobody will notice a 2 microsecond improvement in loading times. Does the code run in a timing-sensitive hot path, like a game loop or a GUI rendering thread? Well now optimization matters. But again, consider the HW argument above.
Also remember that, back then, storage wasn't cheap. 256K of code is 18% of a 1.44MB floppy, and 35% of a 720K floppy.