OT: was: Programmer's conundrums

When you had a 4Mhz machine with 640KB each cycle and each KB of ram were precious. I spent an entire day tuning a loop that computes UDP checksums on a 4.77Mhz machine because my measurements showed that a good deal of my time was in that loop. It was worth rewriting the perfectly good C for loop into inline ASM to squeeze a few hundred thousand cycles per 1K packet. On the early architectures I did professional work on (AS/400) we were exceedingly careful to keep data structures aligned on cache boundaries, have read-only and read/write areas in different cache lines, etc. Those extra interrupts for bad alignment or extra cache traffic were very noticeable, even on faster machines. But now with CPUs doing 2GHz+, I can afford to blow a few cycles. Goodness knows, the OS and software that I'm building on top of are blowing quite a few for me already. Ever stop to think how much the eye candy on a Windows XP costs to run? Or even on a Linux machine .. lots of bloat now. Machines used to be more expensive than programmers. Now programmers are generally far more expensive than machines. There is less need to squeeze every cycle. The goal now is to squeeze every productive minute out of the expensive resource, which is now the human. Only at the very high end of computer science (super computers) do people still go after absolute performance .. for the real world, 'good enough' is the rule. Rational Application Developer 6 needs a 2GB machine to run nicely. Sounds horrible, until you knock out a web application in a day or two. This is an extreme example, but you get the point. Mike