Quote:Yes. Technically you could change the code to make it run faster (given you knew what you were doing). But knowing what to do is a very big stipulation for many people, thus it's not really realistic or easy for people.Writing optimal code is very tiresome. C++ with pointers and memory management doesn't make it easier (though C++ is much faster than Java overall since you have access to memory management).
Loop unrolling, OpenMP, cache blocking. You would need to optimize based on the platform the game is being run on to take advantage of the cache size (requires CPU knowledge I suppose) which isn't an easy task if you are attempting to support multiple platforms.
Alternatively something with thread splitting, but I wouldn't know where to begin in C++, only used Java Nachos in class and Python Reactors (Twisted). Not sure if a reactor based process would be faster since there isn't much in terms of network IO and disk read should be quite fast.