That's actually a good observation, yeah. It's often the case that you dig deeper and deeper and find some incomprehensible spaghetti and just say "fuck it, I'll just do what I can here, should be enough".
42 karma · joined June 19, 2017
And yes, once all the usual tricks have been exhausted, the nest step is looking at the cache/cache line sizes of the exact CPU you’re targeting and dividing the workload into units that fit inside the (lowest level possible) cache, so it’s always hot. And if you’re into this stuff, then you’re probably aware of cache-oblivious algorithms[0] as well :)
Personally, I almost never had the need to go too far into platform-specific code (except SIMD, of course), doing all the stuff in the post is 99% of the way there.
And yeah, C# is criminally underrated, I might write a post comparing high-perf code in C++ and C# in the future.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache-oblivious_algorithm
What I wanted to say was that a spiky profile provides a clear path to optimizing a piece of code, whereas a flat profile usually means there are more fundamental issues (inefficient memory management, pointer chasing all over the place, convoluted object system, etc.).