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Joined 19 days ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • A nice post, and certainly worth a read. One thing I want to add is that some programmers - good and experienced programmers - often put too much stock in the output of profiling tools. These tools can give a lot of details, but lack a bird’s eye view.

    As an example, I’ve seen programmers attempt to optimise memory allocations again and again (custom allocators etc.), or optimise a hashing function, when a broader view of the program showed that many of those allocations or hashes could be avoided entirely.

    In the context of the blog: do you really need a multi set, or would a simpler collection do? Why are you even keeping the data in that set - would a different algorithm work without it?

    When you see that some internal loop is taking a lot of your program’s time, first ask yourself: why is this loop running so many times? Only after that should you start to think about how to make a single loop faster.