I am currently thinking about what would be the best way to get people involved into exchanging knowledge about optimization techniques (for me personally in C++, but it would probably be just as useful for other languages too). So before I come to the core of my question, let me first tell what made me think about it.
On support sites and/or in irc, I often find people asking for help in optimizing a certain piece of code. Sometimes this is offtopic, or smells too much of "gieve teh codez", sometimes it is just premature optimization. But all seem to have in common that people have some code (ideally selfcontained) that someone could modify, and post back. And all of them have people that don't know much about optimization techniques, or worse, are full of optimization myths and wonder why when applying them nothing happens.
Then there seem to be quite some people that know about optimization techniques, and some even like to apply them, but don't have enough opportunities to do so. You can see some of them at sites like euler project where they want to not only correctly solve a given problem, but in a fastest way.
So my idea was: get those people together, let them discuss, and spread knowledge. Let them formulate real knowledge, and extinguish myth. And there is a lot of myth to bust.
So the core of the question is: Is an SE site, with its Q&A format the right tool? Someone I talked to said it would be awesome if people could try out their code like on ideone.com, but actually with the snippet in question being accurately timed, so that people would get their reputation also from the actual speed they achieved. But that would cost hardware, probably a lot when it gets attractive, so besides the question who would pay for it, there is the question whether this would just a gimmick to play with, or something really necessary.
Or in other words, would the SE format already suffice, not only to get questions answered, but to form a solid base of knowledge about optimization techniques that people can reuse?
