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Very well written, and I like that it ends on this note:

> Looking at my hypotheses, I was wrong on all counts

The author expected some things, and had good reasons to, then did a lot of serious work, and ended up finding out somewhat different things. Impressive and honest exploration of a complex topic that is quite hard to measure.

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Totally agree. I would like to stress the "serious work" point. He tried a lot of configurations and kept track of the results. This is not easy as it sounds since most people lack the discipline (me included).

I wish more papers were written like this with clear separation of hypothesis, experimental results and conclusions. Also the clarity of presentation was superb again not an easy task.

Extra bonus points for the intellectual honesty.

Writing a blog post like this and running benchmarks on several combinations of OS, language and compiler options and different tools takes so much effort and time. We should be very thankful to the people who do this. I've done it a couple of times myself... but it was so much more effort than I thought, literally weeks non-stop, that I don't think I will be doing it again any time soon.

Thank you for your kind words! I appreciate your empathy. This project took about 7 weeks (including trimming, porting, benchmarking, optimizing, and finally writing the article).

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