zlacker

Yes. And there’s still lots of places where you can get significant speed ups by simply applying those old techniques in a new domain or a novel way. The difference between a naive implementation of an algorithm and an optimised one is often many orders of magnitude. Look at automerge - which went from taking 30 seconds on a simple example to tens of milliseconds.

I think about this regularly when I compile C++ or rust using llvm. It’s an excellent compiler backend. It produces really good code. But it is incredibly slow, and for no good technical reason. Plenty of other similar compilers run circles around it.

Imagine an llvm rewrite by the people who made V8, or chrome or the unreal engine. Or the guy who made luajit or the Go compiler team. I’d be shocked if we didn’t see an order of magnitude speed up overnight. They’d need some leeway to redesign llvm IR of course. And it would take years to port all of llvm’s existing optimisations. But my computer can retire billions of operations per second. And render cyberpunk at 60fps. It shouldn’t take seconds of cpu time to compile a small program.