5 ms·

I love these videos, it's the kind of no BS programming to press performance on modern computers. Also recommend the Handmade Hero series of him. We have compu

by cryo 5y ago

I love these videos, it's the kind of no BS programming to press performance on modern computers. Also recommend the Handmade Hero series of him. We have computers which are ridiculous fast, but tend to write code which is freaking slow. It's sad that most programs could be 100x faster.

nuerow 5y ago
> We have computers which are ridiculous fast, but tend to write code which is freaking slow. It's sad that most programs could be 100x faster. I feel this sort of comment misses the whole point of going with code which is patently slower than alternatives. The main reason is that performance is a constraint but not a goal, and once it is good enough then there is absolutely nothing to be gained by wasting time on seeking performance gains. Meanwhile, the main resource in software development is man*hours. The faster you write software (add features, fix bugs, etc) the cheaper it is. Thus, software projects benefit the most by adopting and using technology which favour turnaround time, which means higher-level languages, generic full-featured frameworks, and code reuse. They are slow and bloated and not optimized, and they are used without optimization in mind. But they work and they work acceptably. Your client and project manager does not care if you go with a O(n2) implementation that you can whip out right now by reusing a package and has acceptable performance even if there is a O(n) alternative that requires you a few weeks to implement and forces you to test, debug, and maintain a lower level implementation. Performance is meaningless once it's good enough. It matters nothing if your browser wastes 1GB of RAM even though it could just use 100MB because practically everyone already has 8GB to begin with, and if would be foolish to waste resources prioritizing that if no one is willing to pay for that improvement. It matters nothing if your server has a relatively low throughput because it is wasting 10s of milliseconds doing nothing in each response if all your servers barely break 50% utilization. It matters nothing if your frontend is wasting 10s of milliseconds rendering a page if end users don't even notice any delay. If performance is good enough, work is focused on where it matters. We know it's possible to get formula1-level performance by using formula1-level of engineering and maintenance, but the world runs on Volkswagen hatchbacks.
- bsenftner 5y ago
  All this sounds good and practical, until an organization operating in your market optimizes their technology requirements. Suddenly that organization has both exponentially faster technology support for everything they do, and their expense in doing so is exponentially less than your organization. Optimized technology is not "good enough", it changes the nature of the conflict to revenues.
- yakubin 5y ago
  In my experience, people waste performance and manhours at the same time. Many abstractions create more code instead of reducing it, at the same time making the code slower, harder to read and maintain. Would you rather maintain a couple hundred lines of straightforward code or thousands of lines of class hierarchies with delegates and whatnot? See John Carmack on Inlined Code: <http://number-none.com/blow/blog/programming/2014/09/26/carmack-on-inlined-code.html http://number-none.com/blow/blog/programming/2014/09/26/carm...>
  - nuerow 5y ago
    > Would you rather maintain a couple hundred lines of straightforward code or thousands of lines of class hierarchies with delegates and whatnot? I feel this is a gross misrepresentation of the problem. With higher-level frameworks, you can add complex features with one-liners, which by their very nature (generic, extendable, and general purpose) are bloated and underperform when compared with the code you could roll yourself. However you need to write far more code than one-liners to reimplements those features, not to mention the time it you'd take your team to test, validate, and maintain it. Therefore, contrary to your initial assumption, there is indeed a tradeoff between reusing someone else's general-purpose but battle-hardened code with your specialized, lean, but untested code, and the cost to go with rolling our own implementation hardly justifies the potential performance gains.
    - snovv_crash 5y ago
      The truth is that the framework is built on another framework, which is built on another, which is built on another, until we get down to individual transistors. The highest level framework isn't always the one best suited to solving the problem you have. Maybe it's a one-liner, but due to the overhead you have to run a giant distributed system instead of a single machine with share memory. Then the overhead of orchestrating all these machines might be more than writing 10 lines in a lower level framework.

by cryo 5y ago

nuerow 5y ago

> We have computers which are ridiculous fast, but tend to write code which is freaking slow. It's sad that most programs could be 100x faster. I feel this sort of comment misses the whole point of going with code which is patently slower than alternatives. The main reason is that performance is a constraint but not a goal, and once it is good enough then there is absolutely nothing to be gained by wasting time on seeking performance gains. Meanwhile, the main resource in software development is man*hours. The faster you write software (add features, fix bugs, etc) the cheaper it is. Thus, software projects benefit the most by adopting and using technology which favour turnaround time, which means higher-level languages, generic full-featured frameworks, and code reuse. They are slow and bloated and not optimized, and they are used without optimization in mind. But they work and they work acceptably. Your client and project manager does not care if you go with a O(n2) implementation that you can whip out right now by reusing a package and has acceptable performance even if there is a O(n) alternative that requires you a few weeks to implement and forces you to test, debug, and maintain a lower level implementation. Performance is meaningless once it's good enough. It matters nothing if your browser wastes 1GB of RAM even though it could just use 100MB because practically everyone already has 8GB to begin with, and if would be foolish to waste resources prioritizing that if no one is willing to pay for that improvement. It matters nothing if your server has a relatively low throughput because it is wasting 10s of milliseconds doing nothing in each response if all your servers barely break 50% utilization. It matters nothing if your frontend is wasting 10s of milliseconds rendering a page if end users don't even notice any delay. If performance is good enough, work is focused on where it matters. We know it's possible to get formula1-level performance by using formula1-level of engineering and maintenance, but the world runs on Volkswagen hatchbacks.

bsenftner 5y ago
All this sounds good and practical, until an organization operating in your market optimizes their technology requirements. Suddenly that organization has both exponentially faster technology support for everything they do, and their expense in doing so is exponentially less than your organization. Optimized technology is not "good enough", it changes the nature of the conflict to revenues.
yakubin 5y ago
In my experience, people waste performance and manhours at the same time. Many abstractions create more code instead of reducing it, at the same time making the code slower, harder to read and maintain. Would you rather maintain a couple hundred lines of straightforward code or thousands of lines of class hierarchies with delegates and whatnot? See John Carmack on Inlined Code: <http://number-none.com/blow/blog/programming/2014/09/26/carmack-on-inlined-code.html http://number-none.com/blow/blog/programming/2014/09/26/carm...>
- nuerow 5y ago
  > Would you rather maintain a couple hundred lines of straightforward code or thousands of lines of class hierarchies with delegates and whatnot? I feel this is a gross misrepresentation of the problem. With higher-level frameworks, you can add complex features with one-liners, which by their very nature (generic, extendable, and general purpose) are bloated and underperform when compared with the code you could roll yourself. However you need to write far more code than one-liners to reimplements those features, not to mention the time it you'd take your team to test, validate, and maintain it. Therefore, contrary to your initial assumption, there is indeed a tradeoff between reusing someone else's general-purpose but battle-hardened code with your specialized, lean, but untested code, and the cost to go with rolling our own implementation hardly justifies the potential performance gains.
  - snovv_crash 5y ago
    The truth is that the framework is built on another framework, which is built on another, which is built on another, until we get down to individual transistors. The highest level framework isn't always the one best suited to solving the problem you have. Maybe it's a one-liner, but due to the overhead you have to run a giant distributed system instead of a single machine with share memory. Then the overhead of orchestrating all these machines might be more than writing 10 lines in a lower level framework.