On the way to perfect computing

On September 19, 2007 Heb Sutter did a presentation on a subject at MS.

Snippet from description:

High-level languages insulate the programmer from the machine. That’s a wonderful thing — except when it obscures the answers to the fundamental questions of “What does the program do?” and “How much does it cost?”

The C++/C#/Java programmer is less insulated than most, and still we find that programmers are consistently surprised at what simple code actually does and how expensive it can be — not because of any complexity of a language, but because of being unaware of the complexity of the machine on which the program actually runs.

This talk examines the “real meanings” and “true costs” of the code we write…

Video of the presentation at google video:

You can download presentation here