hand-hacking

n. 1. [rare] The practice of translating hot spots from an HLL into
hand-tuned assembler, as opposed to trying to coerce the compiler into
generating better code. Both the term and the practice are becoming
uncommon. See tune , by hand ; syn. with v. cruft. 2. [common] 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.
