5 ms·

You seem to be under the impression that writing efficient code is at odds with writing reliable or robust code. Efficient does not mean unsafe. Efficient code

You seem to be under the impression that writing efficient code is at odds with writing reliable or robust code. Efficient does not mean unsafe. Efficient code does not have to shoot-from-the-hip. Efficiency means that the task is completed with the minimum wasted effort. To assume that you cannot have relieable code that is also efficient is absurd. If reliability is the top priority for your project, it just means you factor that in to your optimizations. It doesn't mean you just ignore efficiency and write any old shit, as seems to be the custom today. Your OpenSSL example seems to suggest the Heartbleed exploit was a result of developers daring to write performant code, and not that they simply wrote buggy or insecure code, performant or not.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
I feel the problem here is what I imagine as this formula: reliability * efficiency = developer skill I.e. for a given level of reliability, you need more skilled[0] developers to be able to write efficient code. And I'm not thinking about premature optimizations here - just that the code an experienced developer will write the first time around will be efficient enough. So in short, if you aim for certain level of reliability and employ cheap/unskilled developers, efficiency will suffer. And as long as companies don't really care about performance, developers will not gain the necessary experience to write efficient code with just-in-time optimizations. -- [0] - for "skilled" meaning probably mostly some knowledge and experience in writing fast code; it's probably not the experience you'll get when all coding you've ever done is for the web.
aninhumer 9y ago
>To assume that you cannot have relieable code that is also efficient is absurd. Of course you can, but often it takes more time (or more expensive developers) than inefficient code, and the people paying the bill don't necessarily benefit from the efficiency.
Brockenstein 9y ago
I think he's referring to the pressures to produce working solutions. And there's a whole laundry list of attributes people attach to that process. And everyone has the opinion that they're ideals represent the best/most important subset of all the possibilities and/or that you should just meet them all or go work at McDonalds. You can certainly write efficient code, that's reliable and robust and secure given the time and resources to do so. It usually comes down to money, and how no matter how efficient or high minded you are, crafting the optimal solution takes more time and resources. IE more money. If you can sell users and clients on the extra costs, great. Otherwise you need to figure out what you can do, with the time and resources you have, that will sufficiently satisfy your customers. And yeah, the problem is with the gobs of resources available on modern computers writing efficient code matters less because most users aren't going to care if their music player is using 1% of the CPU or 10% of the CPU. Of course I say that with the annoying exception I've experienced where the custom MP3 player in GTA V requires a relatively huge amount of resources and will easily reduce performance by 10-20FPS even on an overclocked i5.
BearGoesChirp 9y ago
>You seem to be under the impression that writing efficient code is at odds with writing reliable or robust code. For a given amount of resources invested it is. From a business perspective this includes not just the time a developer spends on a given piece of code, but how good a developer one is willing to pay to work on the code. Perhaps those making the business decisions overestimate the cost of writing more efficient code and underestimate the costs of not writing more efficient code, but they there is a cost that will be taken into account.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

I feel the problem here is what I imagine as this formula: reliability * efficiency = developer skill I.e. for a given level of reliability, you need more skilled[0] developers to be able to write efficient code. And I'm not thinking about premature optimizations here - just that the code an experienced developer will write the first time around will be efficient enough. So in short, if you aim for certain level of reliability and employ cheap/unskilled developers, efficiency will suffer. And as long as companies don't really care about performance, developers will not gain the necessary experience to write efficient code with just-in-time optimizations. -- [0] - for "skilled" meaning probably mostly some knowledge and experience in writing fast code; it's probably not the experience you'll get when all coding you've ever done is for the web.

aninhumer 9y ago

>To assume that you cannot have relieable code that is also efficient is absurd. Of course you can, but often it takes more time (or more expensive developers) than inefficient code, and the people paying the bill don't necessarily benefit from the efficiency.

Brockenstein 9y ago

I think he's referring to the pressures to produce working solutions. And there's a whole laundry list of attributes people attach to that process. And everyone has the opinion that they're ideals represent the best/most important subset of all the possibilities and/or that you should just meet them all or go work at McDonalds. You can certainly write efficient code, that's reliable and robust and secure given the time and resources to do so. It usually comes down to money, and how no matter how efficient or high minded you are, crafting the optimal solution takes more time and resources. IE more money. If you can sell users and clients on the extra costs, great. Otherwise you need to figure out what you can do, with the time and resources you have, that will sufficiently satisfy your customers. And yeah, the problem is with the gobs of resources available on modern computers writing efficient code matters less because most users aren't going to care if their music player is using 1% of the CPU or 10% of the CPU. Of course I say that with the annoying exception I've experienced where the custom MP3 player in GTA V requires a relatively huge amount of resources and will easily reduce performance by 10-20FPS even on an overclocked i5.

BearGoesChirp 9y ago

>You seem to be under the impression that writing efficient code is at odds with writing reliable or robust code. For a given amount of resources invested it is. From a business perspective this includes not just the time a developer spends on a given piece of code, but how good a developer one is willing to pay to work on the code. Perhaps those making the business decisions overestimate the cost of writing more efficient code and underestimate the costs of not writing more efficient code, but they there is a cost that will be taken into account.