Ask HN: Is there a code golf community but for performance instead of size?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34036839

by is_true • 4 years ago

29 17 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I like code golf because you usually can learn more about a language, but I think focusing on performance might be a better use of time.

0823498723498723• 4 years ago

Unlike code drag racing, code golf can be scored independently of the hardware substrate.

(a supercomputer is a device that turns your compute-bound job into io-bound; a mainframe turns io-bound jobs into compute-bound)

brezelgoring2• 4 years ago

Is there a tool where you can check how many instructions your program, with a set input, required to execute the task?

Imagine this, given an x86 C/C++/Rust compiler we all agree upon, and a set of inputs we also share, produce a program that counts - say - the median length of the arrays given or something. After which we'll run our programs in a profiler of sorts that tells us 'this program achieved the task in 1,104,687 cumulative instructions' and we'll compete based on that metric.

It wouldn't really matter what processor you use because the target is the same and so is the compiler.

Is what I suggest possible? It'd be a nice conciliation between platform independence and speed measuring.

leirda• 4 years ago

Yeah, let's just agree on the used architecture, the compiler(s) version(s) and call it a day!

hayst4ck• 4 years ago

Doesn't GDB allow you to step through code instruction by instruction?

I imagine Ghidra or IDA Pro could be souped up to "referee" pretty reasonably.

I would imagine in-lined assembly could circumvent any kind of compiler restriction (just compile it with an optimized compiler and inline the relevant assembly it produces).

syntheweave• 4 years ago

PICO-8 is a good competitive ground for performance coding: it's Lua, but with intentional limiters on size, performance, and source token counts. Writing good PICO-8 code generally means code golfing, with the side effect of the performance limiters being designed to make small code also be fast code - so optimizations are often whole-program.

Real-world performance on modern hardware is often a lot more dull and consists of finding the inner loops, parallelizing what you can, organizing the data to be cache friendly, then getting the loop fast at instruction level. You don't learn the same lessons from that because the majority of the codebase is "dark" and run too infrequently to show up as a bottleneck.

exabrial• 4 years ago

How about one for maintainability?

europeanguy• 4 years ago

You'll only find competitions for things which are easy to measure. You won't find one for maintainability.

db48x• 4 years ago

See also “Someone improved my code by 40,832,277,770%” <https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c33AZBnRHks> by Matt Parker. It can be a really fun game!

is_true• 4 years ago

joshu2• 4 years ago

Computer science in general?

0823498723498723• 4 years ago

Surely computer science is code golf for axioms, or for size of proof?

joshu2• 4 years ago

um. big O notation?

karmakaze• 4 years ago

Advent of Code progresses to the point where simple/brute force solutions fail to work and you have to use better datastructures/algorithms.

Other performance work has dependencies tending to be tied to a database, networked services, etc that's not so bite-sized and sharable.

My early descent into programming was constantly battling with performance getting a 1.79 MHz Atari 8-bit to do interesting things in a 1/30 second. Maybe retrocomputing and writing software for vintage machines or recreated new machines that work like them might be a good challenge.

zzo38computer• 4 years ago

Such a thing can be used in specific systems e.g. NES/Famicom, or the original IBM PC with 8088, but I think not for portable code.

mejutoco• 4 years ago

Leetcode tells you if you are in the top x% in terms of speed. It might scratch that itch.

Ask HN: Is there a code golf community but for performance instead of size?

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