[HN Gopher] Tracking down a 25% Regression on LLVM RISC-V
___________________________________________________________________
Tracking down a 25% Regression on LLVM RISC-V
Author : luu
Score : 78 points
Date : 2026-04-12 19:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.kaving.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.kaving.me)
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| This really shouldn't be free work.
| Jyaif wrote:
| Folks that do this work for "free" do it because they enjoy it.
|
| And a small observation: if you require money to do something,
| you usually have no chance of being as good as the folks that
| do it for the pleasure.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I would suggest that's an availability bias, those who do it
| for free are more likely to blog about it.
|
| There is a common distinction between professional and
| amateur with the former getting paid for their work. In
| general there is an understanding that someone getting paid
| can focus and do it full time and are expected to be better
| than someone who does it as a hobby.
|
| Perhaps coding is an unusual space where the best coders are
| often misfits who have a hard time holding down a job.
| luqtas wrote:
| i think you need to understand more about modern software
| infrastructure [0]
|
| [0]
| https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-
| rep...
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I'm focusing on the following premise;
|
| > if you require money to do something, you usually have
| no chance of being as good as the folks that do it for
| the pleasure
|
| Not only do I think professional have a chance to be as
| good as amateurs, but the elite professionals are on
| average better than the elite amateurs.
|
| I do think that we would be better off if more elite
| amateurs became elite professionals.
| luqtas wrote:
| should i repeat my comment and link the free document i
| doubt you read, again? modern software infrastructure
| runs on "folks that do it for the pleasure"
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I did read it and I agree with the sentiment, but
| disagree that professionals have no chance to reach the
| level of amateurs.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Modern software infrastructure also relies on a lot of
| professionals.
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| > In general there is an understanding that someone getting
| paid can focus and do it full time and are expected to be
| better than someone who does it as a hobby.
|
| For something like flying airplanes, I think this is
| obviously true: nobody can afford to spend the required
| hours doing it unless somebody else is paying for the
| airplane, and the only way that happens is if that person
| is your employer. A lot of things are like that.
|
| But programming is very different, it requires almost no
| resources to practice except your time. You can sit at home
| in your pajamas with $1K worth of hardware and keep
| yourself busy for a lifetime through open source. Of
| course, you can also spend a lifetime building useless
| sandcastles while telling yourself you're a genius: you
| have to find ways to hold yourself accountable to grow.
|
| I've been fortunate to get paid to work on some interesting
| things... but the work I do for fun is, on average, ~100x
| more challenging and interesting than the work I'm paid to
| do. I would be a much much less capable programmer if I'd
| only done work I was paid to do for the past decade.
|
| I wouldn't go so far as to say "amateurs are better than
| professionals", but I think the skill level of the two
| groups is much more blurred in programming than in most
| other things.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Your example is obviously false; there are 500K GA pilots
| in the US alone varying from my friend who had a Cessna
| 172 and flew it regularly (until joining CAP) to John
| Travolta flying his own 737.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| And how would John Travolta at roughly 5K lifetime hours
| compare to the best of the comercial pilots at 1K hours
| per year? Also John Travolta has a commercial licence and
| has been paid to fly.
|
| This argument seems absurd to me.
|
| I get that in software quite often time is wasted by poor
| management that otherwise would not be wasted if working
| unpaid. Well managed research orgs can work at elite
| levels but they are few and far between.
| kubb wrote:
| Sure but then they have to waste time working for money,
| rather than doing God's work.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| > if you require money to do something, you usually have no
| chance of being as good as the folks that do it for the
| pleasure.
|
| ......... o.O i guess the professional football leagues all
| have players who are _worse_ than the rec leaguers? hners are
| delusional...
| tester756 wrote:
| >And a small observation: if you require money to do
| something, you usually have no chance of being as good as the
| folks that do it for the pleasure.
|
| Usually complex things are there, where they money is -
| semiconductor industry, big corpos (chromium, linux, llvm,
| etc), AI, etc.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why not though? The entirety of the LLVM project is available
| to them, and you, for free, as is the RISC-V ISA itself. A lot
| of people are getting a lot of value from free and open
| software, and they may feel their contributions are in a like
| spirit.
| themafia wrote:
| There should be a medal we can give out to people who do
| anyways.
| szmarczak wrote:
| SVGs on Firefox are broken (like 0.1% of the size it needs to
| be).
| LeFantome wrote:
| This could have been a story about any ISA but it warms my heart
| to see RISC-V optimizations like this appearing bit by bit every
| day.
|
| RISC-V chips that are fast enough to get used are appearing now
| and, when they do, the software ecosystem is going to be ready to
| meet it.
|
| In the past, the hardware usually came first with the software
| slow to appear after. This time, it is happening the other way
| around.
| AymanB wrote:
| Thanks for the blog, I really enjoyed it. Good work. This just
| makes me appreciate and love compilers even more, they are a
| fascinating piece of software.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-04-13 23:00 UTC)