Software optimization resources

From my experience the greatest optimization gains can be achieved by introducing more domain knowledge into the code. Heuristics that cut the number of executions of some expensive function, shortcuts that introduce good enough approximations, pre-computing and memoizing certain values that are actually constant in the processed data. Things like that. And in programs that had never been optimized it's usually very easy to fire up the profiler and find some obviously terrible things. Like reinitializing in a…

Anger knows more about Intel and AMD microarchitecture than anyone else I'm aware of who's allowed to write about it freely. His guides, especially his microarchitecture and instruction timing documents, are superb resources that anyone serious about low-level optimization should have on hand.

From the first guide (talking about Java and C#): "The time it takes to load the framework and compile the program are often much more than the time it takes to execute the program, and the runtime framework may use more resources than the program itself when running. Programs using such a framework sometimes have unacceptably long response times for simple tasks like pressing a button or moving the mouse." When efficiency is important, the startup time of the VM…

Once we have nice RISC-V µ-architectures out there, I hope we get the same type of resources for them.