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> Run speed is objective and measurable

Unfortunately in most modern OSes run speed on x86 is variable and profiling itself is intrusive. You might be able to get a general trendline toward a faster algorithm but it'll still be lost in statistical noise.

The second problem is that the underlying processor is a moving target. The x86 programming model doesn't directly map to hardware anymore, with out of order execution, branch predictors and register renaming. One variant of the processor with a particular caching algorithm might have totally different results than the next.



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