Edit: please move this to the other thread. It got moved while I was typing.
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You might consider splitting this discussion into another thread if you choose to continue it.
This is not about what you or I could do...
Compilers like GUI editing tools are just that, tools to increase productivity and permit more timely and practical creation of the end product without the requirement to understand all the underlying details.
While it might require significantly more time, a significantly different set of knowledge, and other resources, I believe significantly faster and smaller binaries to accomplish a given task can be done in assembly, period. It may well require many orders of magnitude in terms of that effort to accomplish those savings, but they are attainable.
Don't get me wrong, compilers are great, but a given compiler cannot produce "optimal" "machine" code for every given application no matter how many passes they make, or flags the developer sets. Abstraction is abstraction, and that is what compilers and GUI editors do, abstract the actual work from the human making the request whatever it is. Without detailed knowledge of the entire system, any results will be suboptimal to some extent no matter how small that may be.
Yes, HTML is the binary in my analogy, but you got my point.
Include was in quotes. Are you saying all your programs are entirely your own and don't rely on any external libraries, procedures, APIs, DLLs, etc. or whatever you want to call them? HA! All of those include yet another layer of abstraction was my point.
I get into these types of arguments all the time with developers and management types when they want a more reliable or fault tolerant end to end solution and believe throwing more hardware will magically provide the solution.
No amount of hardware will replace transactional awareness at the application layer. I can provide an infrastructure that runs at 6 9s, but that won't instantly make an entire end to end application 6 9s. The infrastructure is 3-6 layers abstracted from the application, it can't possibly have awareness of the application requirements.
Compilers make great code, but as they do not have complete visibility to the requirements, they will always create suboptimal code. This is why some portions of drivers and such for things such as video cards and network switches/routers that are absolutely time critical are still written in assembly even today.
Back on the web site. The old web site was maintainable at exactly the level relative to the investment of resources in it combined with the ability of the developer and the system on which it was run.
I wish you the best on improving it going forward.
