I got into a debate with a computer science professor a few months ago when I made a controversial blanket statement that “the code inside loop bodies is the only code that matters for performance.” I should provide some context: I was discussing how multi-threading is about speeding up loops and I don’t care about straight line code which is only gonna execute once (or just a few times). My argument is that programmers do not write billions of lines of straight line code. Its the repetition of code (via loops or recursion) that makes the code “slow.” In fact, I can argue that any time we wait on a computer program to do something useful, we are in fact waiting on a loop (e.g., grep, loading emails, spell checking, photo editing, database transactions, HTML rendering, you name it). It is a rather silly argument but I would like to see some counter arguments/examples. Question: Is parallel programming all about loops/recursions or are there cases where code that executes only once is worth optimizing?
Please note that if the code executing once has a function call which has a loop in it then that counts as a loop, not straight line code. Comments would be great but at least take the time to indicate your vote below.
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