The funny thing is, we forgot how to write programs that spend most of their time in 3% of the code.
Profile a modern application and you see 50 level deep stacks and tiny slices of 0.3% of CPU time spent here and there. And yet these slices amount to 100%.
> In every .NET release, there are a multitude of welcome PRs that make small improvements. These changes on their own typically don’t “move the needle,” don’t on their own make very measurable end-to-end changes. However, an allocation removed here, an unnecessary bounds check removed there, it all adds up. Constantly working to remove this “peanut butter,” as we often refer to it (a thin smearing of overhead across everything), helps improve the performance of the platform in the aggregate.
[0]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvemen...
Practically every part of C# is a hot path because it runs on probably billions of devices every minute of every day. This code is worth micro-optimizing. A 1% improvement in a popular C# library probably saves megawatts of electricity (not to mention the time saves) on a global scale.
Most code is not like that at all. Most code is not worth putting this kind of effort into. Most code is fine being 10% or even 500% slower than it technically could be because computers are lightning fast and can crunch numbers at an incredible speed. Even if the computer is doing 5 times as much work as it needs to it'll still be instant for most use cases. The problem for these kinds of applications arises when it's not doing 5 times as much work as it needs to but 5000 times or 5 million times. Or when the data is just really large and even the optimal solution would take a noticeable amount of time.
Most programs - after dealing with bugs & low hanging fruit - don't have hotspots.
But, in any case, this is why we build large programs using modular architectures. You don't profile the Linux kernel hoping to find a hotspot in some obscure driver somewhere, you profile the driver directly. Same for filesystems, networking etc. Similarly we build libraries for things like arithmetic and SAT solvers etc. that will be used everywhere and optimise them directly.
Your comment reads like you're disagreeing with your parent, but in fact you are reinforcing the point. We've forgotten how to build programs like this and end up with big balls of mud that can't be profiled properly.
Then they add caching to compensate for their crappy system design and stuff like that, bloating the system with lots of unnecessary code. They store the data naively then spend significant processing time preparing the data for delivery rather than just storing the data in an ideal format in the first place. Lots of stuff like that.