4 ms·

I dont know if you've noticed, but most programmers actually do care about performances. They just are bad at it. Software are slow precisely because programmer

I dont know if you've noticed, but most programmers actually do care about performances. They just are bad at it. Software are slow precisely because programmers dont get it: optimising all the code will make slow software. They spend their budget optimising 99% of the code and end up with no more money to make that last 1% fast. For real (game engine programmer speaking). Plus optimising all the code make all the code unreadable which drains even more money from budget. Just as OP said.

astrange 5y ago
Usually simpler code is better. I used to see a lot of mistaken "high performance" code where someone has unrolled all of the loops because they think unreadable code goes faster, though maybe people have gotten better about this? (OpenSSL is an example here.) Unfortunately not all kinds of slowness only happen in hotspots. This is true for CPU cycles, but if an occasional task uses all memory, it's going to mess up everything downstream as well.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  I wonder where the trade-off is for loop unrolling. Like, unrolling a `for` loop that only has 5 iterations makes sense. But if you have 100 iterations, then the larger memory footprint of all the code might actually make it slower than just keeping the `for` loop. In some cases, you can use Duff's Device. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device
selfhoster11 5y ago
> I dont know if you've noticed, but most programmers actually do care about performances. They just are bad at it. I disagree. Programmers may care about performance, but project managers certainly don't and they always have the final say.
- tonyarkles 5y ago
  I’m with both of you and I don’t think what you two are saying is mutually exclusive. I’m kind of a performance nut (often working with teams, I’m the guy that introduces everyone to a profiler) and, in my N=small experience, PMs are opposed to spending time on performance optimization precisely because most people are bad at it and it takes an undefined amount of time for unknown performance gains. When I take an hour to profile and analyze some request and say “I think we can cut this thing’s response time by 80% by optimizing $X, which will result in an overall page load time reduction of 3s”, that’s way easier to sell than “I want to figure out why this page load is so slow” and then reporting back a week later with “shrug I optimized 5 things and it didn’t get faster. Dunno.”
- goatinaboat 5y ago
  Programmers may care about performance, but project managers certainly don't and they always have the final say LOL no. Offer a dev choice between a framework that is trending on Twitter, vs one that is 100x faster but "legacy" (meaning more than a year old) and she'll choose the first one every time, and the project manager won't know the difference, or care if he did.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    If it's good to develop with, I don't care one whit whether a software framework is 2 months old or 20 years old. Besides, not everyone works on greenfield projects and can pick what framework they want.

astrange 5y ago

Usually simpler code is better. I used to see a lot of mistaken "high performance" code where someone has unrolled all of the loops because they think unreadable code goes faster, though maybe people have gotten better about this? (OpenSSL is an example here.) Unfortunately not all kinds of slowness only happen in hotspots. This is true for CPU cycles, but if an occasional task uses all memory, it's going to mess up everything downstream as well.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
I wonder where the trade-off is for loop unrolling. Like, unrolling a `for` loop that only has 5 iterations makes sense. But if you have 100 iterations, then the larger memory footprint of all the code might actually make it slower than just keeping the `for` loop. In some cases, you can use Duff's Device. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device

selfhoster11 5y ago

> I dont know if you've noticed, but most programmers actually do care about performances. They just are bad at it. I disagree. Programmers may care about performance, but project managers certainly don't and they always have the final say.

tonyarkles 5y ago
I’m with both of you and I don’t think what you two are saying is mutually exclusive. I’m kind of a performance nut (often working with teams, I’m the guy that introduces everyone to a profiler) and, in my N=small experience, PMs are opposed to spending time on performance optimization precisely because most people are bad at it and it takes an undefined amount of time for unknown performance gains. When I take an hour to profile and analyze some request and say “I think we can cut this thing’s response time by 80% by optimizing $X, which will result in an overall page load time reduction of 3s”, that’s way easier to sell than “I want to figure out why this page load is so slow” and then reporting back a week later with “shrug I optimized 5 things and it didn’t get faster. Dunno.”
goatinaboat 5y ago
Programmers may care about performance, but project managers certainly don't and they always have the final say LOL no. Offer a dev choice between a framework that is trending on Twitter, vs one that is 100x faster but "legacy" (meaning more than a year old) and she'll choose the first one every time, and the project manager won't know the difference, or care if he did.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  If it's good to develop with, I don't care one whit whether a software framework is 2 months old or 20 years old. Besides, not everyone works on greenfield projects and can pick what framework they want.