Mechanical Sympathy: Writing Java That Respects the Hardware

Martin Thompson coined the term “mechanical sympathy” — the idea that to write fast software you need to understand the machine it runs on. Not at the assembly level necessarily, but well enough to reason about what the CPU, memory hierarchy, and OS are actually doing with your code. This post is what that looks like in practice, writing Java for a system where microseconds matter. ...

December 4, 2012 · 4 min · MW
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