Do you have code where you think this type of inlining operation would provide a meaningful performance improvement? Given the ever-increasing speed of processors on both desktops and mobile devices, how important do you think such optimizations are? Should inlining remain the province of game programmers or should compilers take advantage of such features automatically, without programmer involvement? Let us know in the Wireless discussion group on DevX.
Although hard-core code optimization on modern fast desktop and server machines is an arcane and disappearing art, there's still a need for such optimization when targeting the less powerful processors used in the handheld and mobile devices, particularly for game programming.
nce upon a time, game programmers had to write code in assembler and make many other optimizations to deliver games that ran well even with the slow processors and small memory address spaces available then. Today, processors running at gigahertz speed and hundreds of megabytes of RAM help programmers climb out of the Black Programming Art Tower—a place where only a few could survive.
In fact, the power unleashed by modern PCs is so huge, even compared to computers only ten years ago, that programmers began ignoring the optimizations and creating high-quality games that require increasing amounts of processor power, memory, and disk space. These less-optimized games have proven at least as addictive as the earlier games. In other words, the massive increase in computing power simplified game programming by removing the need for the very knowledge and optimizations that once made game programming an arcane art. For a while it seemed as if the Black Programming Art Tower was closed for good. Only a small number of game companies still push our desktop computers to the edge.
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nce upon a time, game programmers had to write code in assembler and make many other optimizations to deliver games that ran well even with the slow processors and small memory address spaces available then. Today, processors running at gigahertz speed and hundreds of megabytes of RAM help programmers climb out of the Black Programming Art Tower—a place where only a few could survive.
