For me what generally happens if I stop at 9PM, I will work through the problem in my sleep (and it will prevent me from getting a good night sleep), but I will often find a breakthrough the next morning during shower time.

I’m talking about those hard, multi-days debugging problems that nobody can figure out, but as someone else raised, that’s why I get paid good money for it.

It still sucks though. That first response in the thread rings so true, ok now I get it, no you don’t…

it’s not an optimization if you don’t measure an improvement.

This, so much. I often see this at work, theories about this and that being slow, or how something new « should » be better. As the resident code elder I often get to reply « why don’t you measure and find out »…

For some reason it seems nobody uses sampling profilers anymore, those tell you exactly where the time is spent, you don’t have to guess from a trace. Optimizing code is kind of a lost art.

Sometimes I wish compilers were better at data cache optimization, I work with C++ all the time but all of it needs to be done by hand (for example SoA vs AoS…). On the upside, I kind of have a good job security, at least until I retire.

What bothers me the most here is that those are 64 bit instructions, which did not exist when PS/2 was a Thing. But I still chuckled, nice work.

Back then our registers were 32 bits wide, and we liked it 🤣

I remember your previous post, congrats on not giving up.

Whipping up a script to solve a very specific problem is super satisfying, but I found that anything you write quickly becomes a liability. Debugging Perl can be super difficult, especially when returning to something you wrote a while back.

Personally I grew tired of the punishment and left it all behind! If I need a quick script I’ll use Python instead, and if it doesn’t work I can use a real debugger to fix it.

In any case it’s always fun learning new things, I hope this experience ends up being useful to you in the future and you get to easily solve a problem that stumps everyone else involved.

Cheers!

some people on IRC

Well there’s your problem! (just kidding)

Honestly though I don’t know why you would pick Perl unless you want to learn an obscure language that is both painful to read and write. May $deity have mercy on your soul.