this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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Well I be damned. What does the Fortran do ?
Array operations in FORTRAN are much easier for the compiler heavily optimize than it is in c/c++ due to its array model and type system. You can achieve much of the same thing with modern compiler extensions, but it’s difficult and not as portable.
That's interesting, thanks
Its just easy to write super-optimised code snippets in without having to break out into assembly.
What is the reason to avoid assembly? Is it prohibitively difficult?
Not only is it very difficult to write in assembly, the resulting code is not portable. Meaning that if you wrote it on x86 assembly it can't run on ARM chips without emulation and that takes a significant hit on performance defeating the point
Yeah, it's pretty difficult. Think of assembly as just one step above writing 1's and 0's, and you're probably around how difficult it can be
I’ve delved into writing assembly only on the level of a student project. I really enjoyed it though. Obviously implementing a python math library would be far more complex but wouldn’t it be worth it for the possible performance gains?
I don't think it would be anymore. Modern compilers are really really good at what they do, and often manually optimizing(writing assembly yourself) makes programs slower. So unless you are very good at assembly, I would just trust the compiler.