Wirt writes:
> "Increase dramatically" may be too dramatic a phrase. About the
> best you will experience after OCTCOMPing a program will be ca.
> 30% increase in performance[...]

But this will be limited to a 30% improvement in that part of the program's
execution that takes place in the PROG file itself.  If you've got a CPU
intensive program then this might be significant but if, like most MPE
programs, only a few percent of the CPU time is spent in the program it
self, then you're looking at, say, that 30% improvement only applying to 10%
of the run time for something like a 3% effective improvement.

And unless your program uses 100% of the CPU during its run, that 3%
improvement will only apply to a fraction of the total wall-time that the
program requires.

Most MPE application programs spend most of their time in library and OS
code rather than doing computations in user-written code.

This trend is actually increasing over time as programming environments
provide more and more functionality to the programmer at a very high level.
Modern application programming consists to a large part of simply gluing
together some set of externally provided components, so the line-by-line
speed of your own code makes almost no difference any more.

A better algorithm written in a really slow interpreted language will always
beat the pants off a worse algorithm coded in a super-optimized language,
especially when both are implementing most of their functionality using high
quality native components (database, I/O, UI, data structures, etc.)

G.

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