[Sorta OT] Things I love about Transcript

[Richard Gaskin]

Things I Love About Transcript
Episode 19: Why I rarely benchmark anymore

In the olden days 4GLs were slow.  In order to get any reasonable speed out
them you had to carefully eek out the best performance from every handler.

So I used to benchmark various syntax options, eventually giving rise to
HyperBench, SuperBench, and RevBench, tools to help me run those tests just
a little easier.

Today I was writing a function that I intuitively felt might be suboptimal,
but since it's only called infrequently I was inclined to leave it alone as
long as it worked. 

Well, habit got the better of me and I ran it through RevBench:  it takes
0.16 milliseconds on average.  Sure, I might be able to optimize it, but why
bother? :)

That's something I find with the engine a lot, that testing the speed of
algorithms is not nearly as critical as with other 4GLs.  I still test
complex routines now and then, but most of the time I'm less surprised by
discovering speed differences among syntax options than I am simply
impressed by how fast all them run in Scott Raney's engine.

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
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