📝Proebsting’s law

source

Proebsting’s Law

Compiler Advances Double Computing Power Every 18 Years

Perhaps this means Programming Language Research should be concentrating on something other than optimizations. Perhaps programmer productivity is a more fruitful arena.

Argument

• On Proebsting’s Law, Kevin Scott

  The results of our experiment suggest that Proebsting’s Law is probably true. The reality is somewhat grimmer than Proebsting initially supposed.

• How does clang 2.7 hold up in 2021? · GitHub. Back of the napkin analysis of clang performance on 10-year interval. Again, the reality seems to be worse then expected by Proebsting’s law (~10–20% improvement in 10 year interval).

• MIR: A lightweight JIT compiler project | Red Hat Developer calculates ~16% improvement in 17 years.

Counterarguments

• This is true for C, but does it hold for higher-level languages like Haskell? I don’t think so.

  • The Future of Compilers — LtU Classic Archives

See also

• Compiler optimization are still worth to pursue (even though Proebsting’s law states otherwise)