Keep in mind that Bill was talking about programming in assembly language for ex... | Hacker News

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ANTSANTS on Feb 6, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: Programmers At Work: Bill Gates (1986)

Keep in mind that Bill was talking about programming in assembly language for extremely resource-constrained systems there. Even today, if you're trying to write an extremely small/fast program/inner loop in assembly, you had better be relying on "dangerous assumptions" like that, or else the result is going to be worse than what a compiler could do.

Symmetry on Feb 6, 2014 [–]

Ideally you want your type system to enforce as many of these assumptions as possible since when it can you both speed and safety.

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