Intentionally Slowing Down Programs: A Surprising Boost to Developer Tool Accuracy

Most research on programming language performance focuses on speeding up programs, but a new study explores the benefits of intentionally slowing them down. By inserting NOP or MOV instructions into program basic blocks, researchers achieved fine-grained control over program execution, leading to more precise race condition detection, speedup simulation, and profiler accuracy assessment. Experiments on an Intel Core i5-10600 showed that NOP and MOV instructions are best suited for this purpose, opening new avenues for future advanced developer tooling.