Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Q: memoize?

[Michael Poole]

Ron Parker writes:

> I've seen the term memoize popup a few times on the list.  Is there a brief
> explanation of this somewhere?

It's an idea from computer science that instead of re-performing a
costly computation or process, you can store (make a "memo" of) the
result somewhere convenient instead.

It is worth doing if you will use the result again soon and saving the
result is less expensive (in terms of CPU, memory, bandwidth, or
whatever) than recalculating the result.  Predicting whether those
conditions are true is the tricky part of deciding whether to memoize.

Michael Poole