On Friday, 2 August 2013 at 17:16:30 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

On 2013-08-02 15:44:13 +0000, Leandro Lucarella said:

I'm not say is right or wrong for people to have this reflex of thinking
about multipliers, I'm just saying if you care about transmitting the
message as clear as you can, is better to use numbers everybody can
intuitively think about.

And this is in reply to Andrei too. I understand your POV, but if your
main goal is communication (instead of education about side topics),
I think is better to stick with numbers and language that minimizes
confusion and misinterpretations.

Just a humble opinion of yours truly.

Fair enough. So what would have been a better way to convey the quantitative improvement?

Not to speak on Leandro's behalf, but I think the obvious answer is "Reduced compile times by 43%".

It's much more useful to express it that way because it's easier to apply. Say I have a program that takes 100 seconds to compile. Knowing that the compilation time is reduced by 43% makes it easy to see that my program will now take 57 seconds. Knowing that compilation is 75% faster doesn't help much at all - I have to get out a calculator and divide by 1.75.

It's always better to use a measure that is linear with what you care about. Here, most people care about how long their programs take to compile, not how many programs they can compile per second.