Hand-hacking
1. The practice of translating a
hot spot of a program in a
HLL into hand-tuned
assembly language, as opposed to trying to coerce the
compiler into generating better code. Both the term and the practice are becoming uncommon.
See
tune,
bum,
by hand; synonym with cruft.
2. More generally, manual construction or patching of data sets that would normally be generated by a translation utility and interpreted by another program, and aren't really designed to be read or modified by humans.
[
Jargon File]
