On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 11:07:30AM -0500, Ivan Krstic wrote:
Now that Magnus mentioned it on Meta, I'm more
inclined to ask: is
writing Phase IV in C/C++ something that's being actively considered?
Sure, it's an effort, but we're looking at - minimally - an order of
magnitude improvement in performance. That does, however, raise the
question of whether it's worth it to reinvent the wheel (Phase III is
great software) for a problem that, in the foreseeable future, can be
solved cheaply by throwing more processor horserpower into the mix, and
by better caching.
-IK
Well, an order of magnitude means we can do the same amount of work with
half the machines we have now, or twice as much with the same. That's a
pretty big deal. That said, rewriting the entire codebase in C/C++ will
take a huge amount of developer time. If there are any time-sensitive
spots in the code, it might be worth recoding those in C/C++ - but I
don't know about the entire codebase. I really don't think that's a
"win", as far as developer time, or future maintainability.
--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN