Code Craft

What Is Optimization?

The word optimization purely means to make something better, to improve it. In our world, it’s generally taken to mean “making code run faster,” measuring a program’s performance against the clock. But this is only a part of the picture. Different programs have different requirements; what’s “better” for one may not be “better” for another. Software optimization may actually mean any of the following:

• Speeding up program execution

• Decreasing executable size

• Improving code quality

• Increasing output accuracy

• Minimizing startup time

• Increasing data throughput (not necessarily the same as execution speed)

• Decreasing storage overhead (i.e., database size)

Conventional optimization wisdom is summed up by M.A. Jackson’s infamous laws of ...