High Performance, Rules that Survive Measurement
por Frank de Alcantara em 10/07/2026
This article is also available in Portuguese.
In March 2013, Andrei Alexandrescu published on Facebook’s engineering blog the transcript of a talk with three optimization tips for C++. Three. Not thirty, not “ten tricks compilers hate”. Three: measure before believing, reduce the strength of operations, and minimize writes to memory. The article aged better than most frameworks released that year, which says something about frameworks and something about fundamentals.
This article was translated into English using the Claude AI assistant, running the Fable 5 model, on July 10, 2026.
The most quoted part is not even one of the tips. It is the observation that modern CPUs abandoned the deterministic model, one cycle per operation, memory with no waiting, in exchange for statistical performance: deep caches, long pipelines, speculative execution, register renaming. The processor became faster on average and less predictable in any particular case. The practical consequence is uncomfortable: your intuition about what is fast is, with high probability, wrong. His was too. That is why he measured.
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