shlomif_tech [shlomif]

I published a new essay about optimising code for speed on my site, which you are welcome to read. Quoting from it:

We've all seen the fact that while computers got faster, software has often become slower to run unless the hardware is upgraded. The so-called "Gates' Law" claims that commercial programs decrease in speed by half every 18 months, due to various reasons. It is well known that the various versions of the DOS operating system ran adequately on a PC XT's and 286's and that a Intel 386 was a "lean and mean DOS machine" as a certain journalist claimed back then. On the other hand, Microsoft Windows 3.0 and Microsoft Windows 3.1 already required a fast 486 computer to be ran comfortably, while Windows 95 was barely usable there and needed a Pentium computer. Windows XP already ran slowly on a Pentium machine and required a high end Pentium III or Pentium 4 computer. Windows Vista requires even more hardware resources than Windows XP, up to the point that many computers in use today cannot run it comfortably.

Now, while software simulations that run directly against the CPU and memory (and possibly hard-disk) are still running much faster than before, the responsiveness of the system itself does not seem to improve much.

I used Wikibooks to work on this article. Except for a few minor changes from other people, I was the only contributor. One thing that disappointed me was that wiki2xml (a MediaWiki extension that can convert the text to DocBook/XML and other formats) blissfully ignored all internal or wikipedia links ([[…]]), rendering many links in the article useless. This required that the article be extracted from the wiki by cleaning up the HTML of the page.