hand hack

hand hack

(jargon)1. (Or "hand cruft") To Translate a hot spot of aprogram in a HLL into assembly language by hand, asopposed to trying to coerce the compiler into generatingbetter code. Both the term and the practice are becominguncommon.

See tune, bum.

2. More generally, manual construction or patching of datasets that would normally be generated by a translation utilityand interpreted by another program, and aren't really designedto be read or modified by humans.