You don’t need to, but if you ever want to really optimise some code, understanding what it turns into on the target CPU really helps. Especially if you know the implications for any particular instruction (cost of memory access, branch prediction misses, etc)
Most devs won’t ever need to know this stuff, but as someone who grew up with computers that could barely do anything without grinding to a halt (8bit computer, 2mhz processor, 32kb of RAM, 20kb of which is for the screen), I still find this stuff useful.
Ah the traditional browser stress test from the .NET team. :)
Joke aside, yet another interesting read of all little improvements that go across all the runtime, and very much appreciated that they put out the effort to go through this detail level.
> The sections that follow are full of real improvements. A bounds check removed, an allocation that no longer happens,
Annoyingly the.net blog seems to have started to use LLMs to write their copy. Using "real" twice in one paragraph - do LLMs do that? Lots of commas is a tell for me.
> This is a long one. It’s meant to be. Grab your hot beverage of choice, settle in, and let’s turn it up.
These comments about potential LLM usage are so boring. Stephen is doing this kind of blog post since 6+ years. They all look the same. Read it! It’s very good. Performance deep dives with this kind of quality are rare.
I suspect it was done old school: Written by Stephen and passed to a LLM to fill in all those links and other garnish and then passed back for final polish by Stephen. That's how I do my write ups (but generally without the LLM bit for shorter efforts).
This is a long write up, and I'm sure it will have been assisted, but in the right way, and not a sloppy way.
I've dropped several commas before conjunctions, soz!
FWIW the .NET 10 release also had 2 occurrences of "real" in literally the first paragraph.
I, too, tire of the constant YOU WROTE THIS WITH LLMs outrage. An incredible engineer dumped an ENORMOUS amount of technical knowledge at your feet, and you're commenting on the smell? Is that all you have to contribute?
I saw this too on the Ryan Carniato/SolidJS 2.0 announcement post. A world-class engineer makes a great blog post, and all the comments can focus on are the LLM-smells. Oh well. Any reason not to learn, I guess.
Most devs won’t ever need to know this stuff, but as someone who grew up with computers that could barely do anything without grinding to a halt (8bit computer, 2mhz processor, 32kb of RAM, 20kb of which is for the screen), I still find this stuff useful.
But I am a bit of a performance tuning nerd, so..
I can wind it up to 15! \||/ (is there an official ASCII art four finger devil's horns)
Joke aside, yet another interesting read of all little improvements that go across all the runtime, and very much appreciated that they put out the effort to go through this detail level.
Annoyingly the.net blog seems to have started to use LLMs to write their copy. Using "real" twice in one paragraph - do LLMs do that? Lots of commas is a tell for me.
> This is a long one. It’s meant to be. Grab your hot beverage of choice, settle in, and let’s turn it up.
Ugh.
I suspect it was done old school: Written by Stephen and passed to a LLM to fill in all those links and other garnish and then passed back for final polish by Stephen. That's how I do my write ups (but generally without the LLM bit for shorter efforts).
This is a long write up, and I'm sure it will have been assisted, but in the right way, and not a sloppy way.
I've dropped several commas before conjunctions, soz!
I, too, tire of the constant YOU WROTE THIS WITH LLMs outrage. An incredible engineer dumped an ENORMOUS amount of technical knowledge at your feet, and you're commenting on the smell? Is that all you have to contribute?
I saw this too on the Ryan Carniato/SolidJS 2.0 announcement post. A world-class engineer makes a great blog post, and all the comments can focus on are the LLM-smells. Oh well. Any reason not to learn, I guess.