Archive for the ‘opt’ tag
Reading and Writing no comments
Like I said on my previous post, I`ve been reading Write Great Code Vol2. One of the ideas behind reading it was gaining more assembly knoledge and being able to write and optmize better assembly code. That is happening, at a small pace but gradually, though something more interesting began to happen that I wasn`t really expecting.
I`m now am able to read my compilers assembly output and have a better understandment of whats going on behind the scene. Now this may not sound like a big thing, but take the following example:
I was coding a particle engine for a new game i`m working on. Now I wanted this game to be a particle fest, like Geometry Wars. You could describe the basic particle loop engine as:
- update particle position
- render particle
- repeat for every particle
Steps 2 and 3 are a bit of self explanatory, but i was spending way to much time on step 1. Out of curiosity I started looking at the assembly code on that section and saw that the debug build was taking way more overhead than necessary.
You see each particle is an object, and I was accessing its position via setters and getters. That was slowing way to much the debug build because of all the function calls. On the release the compiler would optmize it away, but since I tested the debug version more than the release, it slowed down the development process as a whole.
So I made a decision that most software engineers wouldn`t recommend and made the particles position public instead of private, and accessed them directly. Alas the debug version speed up!
I thought to myself that when trying to write fast code, sometimes giving up good software practices might do the trick. I was a bit skeptic at first, but ironically I ended up reading the exact same statemnt on Write Great Code Vol2. The author even used the same example of setters/getters.
Regardless of if this is a good practice or not, I`m glad I`m able to have a better undestandment of my code, how it works and to know what kind of choices should I take as each situtation arises.
I`m defiantly going to pick up Write Great Code Vol1 after finishing this one.
