Re: Faster UTF-8 decoding in GLib

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

On 03/16/2010 01:18 PM, Daniel Elstner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Am Dienstag, den 16.03.2010, 13:01 -0400 schrieb Behdad Esfahbod:
>>>
>>> I've made a glib branch where I tried to optimize the UTF-8 decoding routines:
>>> http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/zabaluev/glib.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/fast-utf8
>>
>> Before any changes are made, can you provide real-world performance profiles
>> suggesting that UTF-8 decoding is taking a noticeable time of any particular
>> real-world use case?  If no, I don't see the point.
> 
> Well, I would see a point since UTF-8 decoding is a fairly generic
> operation.  It cannot hurt to be as fast as possible at this task.
> Assuming, of course, that the optimization does not introduce other
> costs elsewhere, which I think the proposal unfortunately does.

That's one of the worst ideas as far as software goes.  If an operation takes
1% of your application time and you make it 1000 times faster, you know how
much total faster your application would run? 1.01x faster...

That developer time can be put somewhere more useful instead....  Like
optimizing something that is taking 20% time, or 50%, or 70%.

behdad

> --Daniel