Optimization
maddog's Doghouse
Understanding how optimization works is just as crucial to fast code as a good compiler.
I have written about the importance of knowing how things work "from the bottom up." Usually, this includes understanding (at least at an overall level) how the hardware works and how compilers and operating systems accomplish their tasks.
Recently a university student I know was taking a course on embedded systems, and they were writing a device handler in the C language. The student had defined a global variable to hold a value that would be filled in by the hardware itself, and not initialized by any other statement. Their professor told them that they had to declare the variable "volatile," or else the compiler might "optimize" the variable outside of the scope of the module. From the code the compiler could "see," there was no way that the variable's value would change, so normal optimizations might assume that the value in the variable was the same as the first time it was set, and that registers loaded with the contents of that variable would still be valid.
Wrong.
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