RFC: Optimizing for 386

[Colin Walters]

On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 10:27 -0600, Joseph D. Wagner wrote:
> > You could have spend some time searching through the archives
> 
> You could have spent some time counting the huge numbers of people who are asking for the same thing I am asking for, and perhaps a little time working towards those ends.

I think the reason many people are asking about it is many people do not
understand performance tuning.  I'm one of them; several times I've
guessed at what is making my program slow, and have been completely
wrong.  The right approach is to use tools to identify specific
bottlenecks in specific programs or libraries.  

As for the specific case of extended CPU instructions, many packages do
already use them at runtime.  For example, GStreamer does that.