Got myself a few months ago into the optimization rabbit hole as I had a slow quant finance library to take care of, and for now my most successful optimizations are using local memory allocators (see my C++ post, I also played with mimalloc which helped but custom local memory allocators are even better) and rethinking class layouts in a more “data-oriented” way (mostly going from array-of-structs to struct-of-arrays layouts whenever it’s more advantageous to do so, see for example this talk).
What are some of your preferred optimizations that yielded sizeable gains in speed and/or memory usage? I realize that many optimizations aren’t necessarily specific to any given language so I’m asking in [email protected].
I patched someone else’s program which was known for being slower when it’s used for a longer time. It was iterating over items in its window just to reach the last element, the more items the slower, it became snappy when i taught it to keep a pointer to the last element.
Not mind blowing, I know, but it was a popular program and this made life better for many people.