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aidenn0 • today at 3:40 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

1. For the most common things people will write, we have a plethora of asymptotically optimal choices that have been discovered.

2. Consider any algorithm of roughly linear complexity (this probably applies to N lg N as well): the only way to make it significantly faster now is to improve parallelism (whether making it so the CPU can exploit ILP, running multicore, or running on a GPU). In 1992, you could make things run significantly faster by just waiting until it was 1994.

Replies

Joker_vD • today at 5:02 PM

> In 1992, you could make things run significantly faster by just waiting until it was 1994.

    In the late 90s a couple of companies, including Microsoft and Apple, noticed (just a little bit sooner than anyone
    else) that Moore's Law meant that they shouldn't think too hard about performance and memory usage... just build
    cool stuff, and wait for the hardware to catch up. Microsoft first shipped Excel for Windows when 80386s were too
    expensive to buy, but they were patient. Within a couple of years, the 80386SX came out, and anybody who could
    afford a $1500 clone could run Excel.

    As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You
    could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and
    roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don't have groupies.

    So, we don't care about performance or optimization much anymore.

                                                                             — Joel Spolsky, "Strategy Letter VI" (2007)
Also, during that time the computer market grew extensionally as well: there were a lot of people who didn't have a computer, and when they went to buy one, they'd naturally buy one of the more modern, more powerful models. Nowadays, it's mostly people updating their already owned hardware.