3 ms·

I have thought for awhile, and continue to think, that developers avoid "premature" optimization too fiercely. Yes, there are diminishing returns with optimizat

by jaawn 9y ago

I have thought for awhile, and continue to think, that developers avoid "premature" optimization too fiercely. Yes, there are diminishing returns with optimization effort, but too often people interpret "avoid premature optimization" as "never optimize unless it feels slow, and even then only if it feels slow when it's the only thing running. Otherwise, blame everything else that is running first!"

taeric 9y ago
Indeed, the quote of Knuth on this is followed immediately by not neglecting that critical minority of code where it matters. Sadly, the promise of zero cost abstraction is a huge siren call. And not likely to change anytime soon.
- jaawn 9y ago
  "Zero cost abstraction" is like a sarcastic joke at this point in web development. If you pull up performance comparisons for web backends, a lot of the popular ones based on interpreted languages are absolutely abysmal when compared to c++ or Java code (Node is a good example). Many definitely have streamlined development workflows and have nice, high-level abstractions, but at a cost to performance. I don't mean that Node is useless or something, sometimes it makes sense, but it still forces you to compromise. Front-end frameworks are even worse. A lot of older (but not "ancient") PCs are unusable on the modern web because of poorly-optimized JS or Adobe Flash (a decent portion of this issue is also due to the inherent inefficiency of JS and Flash as well). Fortunately, Google has been making strides with V8, Mozilla did awesome with Firefox "Quantum" and everyone is slowly ditching Flash, but performance still seems to be an ever-present issue.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - taeric 9y ago
    Fully agreed. I might extend it beyond web. It does seem to be getting comical.
drak0n1c 9y ago
Not to mention that the "never optimize until it feels slow" judgement calls are usually conducted on Macbook Pros with fast internet.
- jaawn 9y ago
  Oh absolutely. I have been noticing this is starting to happen with SSDs as well. A lot of modern games run awful on mechanical drives.
  - cobalt 9y ago
    that's unfortunately because we are pushing fancier and fancier models with higher and higher resolution textures

by jaawn 9y ago

taeric 9y ago

Indeed, the quote of Knuth on this is followed immediately by not neglecting that critical minority of code where it matters. Sadly, the promise of zero cost abstraction is a huge siren call. And not likely to change anytime soon.

jaawn 9y ago
"Zero cost abstraction" is like a sarcastic joke at this point in web development. If you pull up performance comparisons for web backends, a lot of the popular ones based on interpreted languages are absolutely abysmal when compared to c++ or Java code (Node is a good example). Many definitely have streamlined development workflows and have nice, high-level abstractions, but at a cost to performance. I don't mean that Node is useless or something, sometimes it makes sense, but it still forces you to compromise. Front-end frameworks are even worse. A lot of older (but not "ancient") PCs are unusable on the modern web because of poorly-optimized JS or Adobe Flash (a decent portion of this issue is also due to the inherent inefficiency of JS and Flash as well). Fortunately, Google has been making strides with V8, Mozilla did awesome with Firefox "Quantum" and everyone is slowly ditching Flash, but performance still seems to be an ever-present issue.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- taeric 9y ago
  Fully agreed. I might extend it beyond web. It does seem to be getting comical.

drak0n1c 9y ago

Not to mention that the "never optimize until it feels slow" judgement calls are usually conducted on Macbook Pros with fast internet.

jaawn 9y ago
Oh absolutely. I have been noticing this is starting to happen with SSDs as well. A lot of modern games run awful on mechanical drives.
- cobalt 9y ago
  that's unfortunately because we are pushing fancier and fancier models with higher and higher resolution textures