TL;DR; don’t just count things when a weighted sum is more appropriate.
Big O vs Hardware: Better Complexity ≠ Better Performance
Submitted 3 weeks ago by abhi9u@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/big-o-vs-hardware
Comments
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
ftbd@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
TL;DR: Big-O notation describes asymptotic behavior
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s the old galactic algorithm. Imagine an algorithm that takes the age of the universe to compute the result, but it always takes the same time independent of the input. This makes it O(1) complexity.
Now imagine you want to sort a list with 100 elements. Pretty much any other sorting algorithm, no matter the complexity, will finish much faster than the galactic one from above.
Complexity matters only when
n
gets large enough, and in some casesn
stays small enough that algorithmic complexity doesn’t matter.