I recently stumbled on a blog post called Building Faster AMD64 Memset Routines, written by Joe Bialek of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). The blog describes his efforts to improve the performance of the Windows kernel memset() function, across all sizes of memory to set. The reported optimizations are quite fascinating, and could be summed by avoiding branches even at the cost of doing redundant stores. Basically, stores are free while branches are expensive.
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Assembly Programming as Game: “Human Resource Machine”
Human Resource Machine, from the Tomorrow Corporation, is a puzzle game that basically boils down to assembly-language programming. It has a very charming graphical style and plenty of entertaining sideshows, hiding the rather dry core game in a way that really works! It is really great fun and challenging – even for myself who has a reasonable amount of experience coding at this low level. It feels a bit like coding in the 1980s, except that all instructions take the same amount of time in the game.
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The Details of Speed
I just read a fairly interesting book about the British Spitfire fighter plane of World War 2. The war bits were fairly boring, actually, but the development story was all the more interesting. I find it fascinating to read about how aviation engineers in the 1930s experiment and guess their way from the slow unwiedly biplanes of World War 1 and the 1920s to the sleek very fast aircraft of 1940 and beyond. It is a story that also has something tell us about contemporary software development and optimization.