Hi David,

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:17:01 +0100
David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
> It was correct.  Since that time I have a healthy dose of scepticism
> about people (and teams) tinkering with their algorithms and "coming
> through".
> 
> The real metric is not how much you improve things, but where they
> should be in the first place.
> 
> I am not implying that this is happening here.  But if we are several
> orders of magnitude behind the competition, the proven ability of
> squeezing off some runtime at the cost of legibility (and thus also
> the viability of further optimizations without destabilization) is
> not a useful metric.
The impression I get is that Bazaar has its concerns well-separated
enough internally that an entirely new algorithm for a given part of
the code base can be substituted in without a great deal of hassle.
That is to say, many of the performance improvements being made are
not tweaks to existing algorithms, but replacements of the existing
algorithms with better ones. A recent example of this would be knits
being replaced by packs in the storage layer.


Dan