(April 24, 2016 at 3:41 am)pocaracas Wrote: I've had to write code for real time control...and have seen similar code written by someone with far more experience than me.
I tell you, it's worth knowing how to save CPU cycles, memory, stack, etc...
In anything CPU intensive and/or long-running, absolutely.
A lot of code is so I/O bound that non-I/O related code is often not worth much optimization. These days it's cheaper to just throw hardware at the problem in general purpose computing.
With the kind of work you do, the datasets you work with, you probably can use all the optimization you can get. I do boring business software, very little is worth the trouble, though I am currently working on a project where it matters because the unoptimized solution would require over a hundred servers. Even then we opted for a third party solution rather than roll our own.