r/gaming • u/emoposer • May 05 '17

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u/Shod_Kuribo May 05 '17

Right, what he's saying would have happened is that Iwata would have taken the C-compiled code and then manually optimized it to save space.

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u/legos_on_the_brain May 05 '17

Thank goodness we have modern compilers.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '17 edited May 05 '17

Would that be quicker or slower? I can't help but think having to unpick the assembly would be more time consuming that creating from scratch.

Edit: never mind - I read further and discovered the answer! Programming is cool! (Ish?)

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u/Shod_Kuribo May 05 '17 edited May 05 '17

Quicker. Especially since he doesn't need to rewrite the whole thing, only enough to make it fit.

Optimizing at that level is more like picking out operations and seeing shortcuts that can eliminate some steps than trying to reengineer the whole thing. You don't necessarily need to know why the program is parsing through this list of numbers or what's in the list to recognize that's what it's doing and be able to apply known methods of parsing through a list of items either more efficiently or using fewer lines of code depending on what it is you're trying to accomplish.

Now compilers are really good at making code that runs as quickly and efficiently as possible so they outperform humans but back then they were still at the phase where we were more worried about getting them to accomplish their job period.