I like this bit at the end:
As a side note, the program is amazingly performant. For small numbers the results are instantaneous and for the large number close to the 2^32 limit the result is still returned in around 10 seconds.
Really makes you question your sanity when optimizing jumps in code without benchmarks.
For a long time I’ve been of the opinion that you should only ever optimize for the next sucker colleague who might need to read and edit your code. If you ever optimize for speed, it needs to be done with massive benchmarking / profiling support to ensure that the changes you make are worth it. This is especially true with modern compilers / interpreters that try to use clever techniques to optimize your code either on the fly, or before making the executable.
I’m absolutely on-board …in application code.
I do feel like it’s good, though, when libraries optimize. Ideally, they don’t have much else to do than one thing really well anyways.
And with how many libraries modern applications pull in, you do eventually notice whether you’re in the Python ecosystem, where most libraries don’t care, or in the Rust ecosystem, where many libraries definitely overdo it. Because well, they also kind of don’t overdo it, since as a user of the library, you don’t see any of it, except the culmulative performance benefits.
I’m still mad he didn’t use the size of the number to tell the system which block to read first. I feel like that would be a great use of division or maybe modulus?
Now we just need to someone to package it and upload it to NPM.
Could be easily made 50% space saving by only iffin all odds and return even on else. Maybe one if before to handle overflow to avoid wrong even if over the last if.
Yeah but then ALL even numbers would be slow to compute because you would have to chain through every odd before you know that 2 is even.
Depends on the expected distribution of input values
Let’s be real though, everything is IF statements all the way down
There’s not a single thing in this universe that cannot be accomplished with enough IF statements… as long as you’ve got infinite time to wait
The problem with if is the answer comes from user. There’s no mathematical reason or scientific explanation, only programmer who thinks the answer should include the subject.
This is poetry.
My favourite part is that he uses the modulo operator in his Python script to generate the C code.
