Code Complete, 2nd Edition

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

You might expect that performance attributes of systems would have changed somewhat in the 10 years since I wrote the first edition of Code Complete, and in some ways they have. Computers are dramatically faster and memory is more plentiful. In the first edition, I ran most of the tests in this chapter 10,000 to 50,000 times to get meaningful, measurable results. For this edition I had to run most tests 1 million to 100 million times. When you have to run a test 100 million times to get measurable results, you have to ask whether anyone will ever notice the impact in a real program. Computers have become so powerful that for many common kinds of programs, the level of performance optimization ...