Re: Expected bytes per sloc (semicolons) performance

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Wellllll........ Maybe not *totally* useless. In the early phases of a
project you need to get some half-way reasonable grasp on what you think
you're going to need in the way of memory. So maybe you've got experience
with a similar application and you can run some or all of its code through a
known compiler and see what you get in terms of bytes/sloc. The next step
would be to come up with some WAG about what you think you'll have in SLOCs
and use your bytes/sloc as a very crude yardstick to give you something only
*slightly* better than a WAG at how much memory you'll need. Now its a SWAG
instead of a WAG.

Its probably better than consulting an ouiji board or tarot cards - just not
by a whole lot. If you understand the limitations of what you're doing, you
might not be an order of magnitude off when you design the hardware memory
limitations.

It does raise an interesting problem. If you have to commit to certain
parameters early on in the project (such as memory or processor speed) how
do you estimate how much you'll need when you don't have the software yet?
Even assuming you've got prior experience with similar systems, you really
have no good basis in measurement to make estimates until there is some
actual software available. Maybe this suggests that software development
should start way in advance of hardware decisions. But that has its own
problems with respect to time-to-market and other considerations.

Everyone can criticize just about any attempt to make measurements and
estimates for lots of good reasons. Who could suggest a better alternative
for how to make these estimates early on in a project when critical
decisions must be made?

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Stephen Leake" <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote in message
news:uy9n31060.fsf@gsfc.nasa.gov...
>
> Yes. So once again, bytes/sloc is a non-useful measure.
>