In Carl De Marcken's Inside Orbitz email [1] he has the following item:
> 10. ... We disassemble most every Lisp function looking for inefficiencies and have had both CMUCL and Franz enhanced to compile our code better.
In 2001 there was a series of three panel discussions on dynamic languages [2] that are an absolute goldmine: about six hours worth of listening, with various luminaries discussing deep ideas and fielding questions from the audience. Knuth is cited several times on different topics. This is also where I learned about the idea of stepping through every line of code you can get to (Scott McKay brought this up in the panel on runtime [3]. You ought to be able to find the other two panels (compilation and language design) from that one. Anyway, they discuss a lot of idea behind performance, for example
a) code that is locally bad but globally good
b) optimizing for locality and predictability of memory access (David Moon, in the Compilation panel, I think)
c) speculation that performance improvement could be gained via having an efficient interpreter residing in cache, over optimized compiled code (Scott McKay again, in the panel on runtime - incidentally I think this idea is proven in Kdb+ - at least, I understand that is their secret to performance, or one of them)
In Carl De Marcken's Inside Orbitz email [1] he has the following item:
> 10. ... We disassemble most every Lisp function looking for inefficiencies and have had both CMUCL and Franz enhanced to compile our code better.
In 2001 there was a series of three panel discussions on dynamic languages [2] that are an absolute goldmine: about six hours worth of listening, with various luminaries discussing deep ideas and fielding questions from the audience. Knuth is cited several times on different topics. This is also where I learned about the idea of stepping through every line of code you can get to (Scott McKay brought this up in the panel on runtime [3]. You ought to be able to find the other two panels (compilation and language design) from that one. Anyway, they discuss a lot of idea behind performance, for example
a) code that is locally bad but globally good
b) optimizing for locality and predictability of memory access (David Moon, in the Compilation panel, I think)
c) speculation that performance improvement could be gained via having an efficient interpreter residing in cache, over optimized compiled code (Scott McKay again, in the panel on runtime - incidentally I think this idea is proven in Kdb+ - at least, I understand that is their secret to performance, or one of them)
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html
[2] http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dynlangs/wizards-panels.html
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LG-RtcSYUQ
Edit: cleaned up formatting Edit 2: and more clean up