Re: What's more important optimisations or debugging?

David Brown wrote:

Remember Knuth's golden rules about optimisation:

1. Don't do it.
2. (For experts only) Don't do it yet.

I remember there being a third:

3. Before you do it, measure.

That applies to hand-tuning of the source code, rather than automatic optimisations in a compiler, but it's important to remember that the speed of the code is irrelevant if it does not work.

While that latter statement applies rather widely, let's keep in mind that this is the embedded programming newsgroup after all, where real-time constraints are a regular old fact of life. That means speed and correctness may not be separable just like that. Sometimes, if code is slow, that alone means it does not work.
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