retard wrote:
It's difficult to measure performance improvements overall in applications like image manipulation software or sound wave editors. E.g. if a complex effect processing takes now 2 seconds instead of 4 hours, but all GUI event processing is 100% slower, during the workday the application might only work 10% faster overall. The user spends much more time in the interactive part of the code. From what I've read, bearophile mostly only uses synthetic tests.
I find that benchmarks are useful in figuring out new ways to optimize code, but not very useful in predicting the performance of a compiler on any of my apps.
