On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 11:17:45PM -0400, Anthony de Boer wrote:
Too much of a modern system is in various scripting languages, which do effectively that everytime you run them. Granted, so long as you're not doing tight inner loops in a script the performance hit isn't as bad as it can be. Shell scripts that forked N things per loop iteration used to really crawl along, though the fact we had a couple of dozen users on a 386 running SVR3 might have had something to do with it too.
Optimization is getting to be a lost art.
Well there is a difference between not optimizing, and purposely unoptimizing.
Part of the reason I run Gentoo is to have the source code aboard my system and be sure the binaries were compiled from exactly that; their infrastructure facilitates that and the build process has to be robust enough to work on various strange folks' machines. (The other part was at the time wanting something as unlike an RPM-based distro as possible due to having had enough of that for awhile.)
But running gentoo you do not recompile the same code each time you boot. Just doing it once is sufficient.
Crazy would be taking something like Debian or Red Hat where you're supposed to love and run their distributed binaries and recompile them all yourself and find out how many builds only worked that once and are irreproduceable. But someone somewhere has to keep them honest. :-)
Debian even has a "reprodueable builds" project going on, hunting down any package that generates different result each time you rebuilt it, and fixing them. -- Len Sorensen