2026-04-15 16:22 UTC
Refcount contention? Fighting over a cache line. Branch mispredict? Wouldn't have hurt much if resolving the comparison wasn't waiting on a load. You found an approach with better computational complexity? It probably has worse memory access patterns at realistic sizes, just use an array. Fancy ECS for your game? Just syntax sugar for AoS->SoA. Compacting garbage collection overhead? Sometimes *less than zero* because it improves memory layout.
Cache rules everything around me
Replies (3)
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@gim@lou.lt 2026-04-15 18:21
@Catfish_Man RAM, RAM bill y'all
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@AVincentInSpace@furry.engineer 2026-04-15 19:37
@Catfish_Man i don't think i'll ever forget how i felt when i replaced a linear search over a large array with a binary search and performance got worse, and then i left the code the same changed the element i was searching for to be something that was known to be at the very beginning or very end of the array and the search time got cut in half, and i realized big-O complexity didn't correspond to real-world performance even on large datasets
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@thomas@mastodon.deniau.org 2026-04-16 07:45
@Catfish_Man it’s one of the questions in my standard algorithms interview. « Congrats, you found the O(n)!! But my own solution is n log n and faster, why? »