alt Hacker NewsExactly. I'm sure assembly language programmers from the 1980s could easily write code that ran 2x faster than the code produced by compilers of the time, but compilers only got better and eventually assembly language programming became a rare job, and humans can rarely outperform compilers on whole program compilation.
Assembly experts still write code that runs faster than code produced by compilers. Being slower is predictable and solved with better hardware, or just waiting. This is fine for most so we switched to easier or portable languages. Output of the program remains the same.
Impact of having 1.7x more bugs is difficult to assess and is not solved that easily. Comparison would work if that was about optimisations: code that is 1.7x slower / memory hungry.