4 ms·

IMO it all comes down to the, 'Premature optimization is the root of all evil.' That saying was, at its best, not great. But it seems at some point down the roa

IMO it all comes down to the, 'Premature optimization is the root of all evil.' That saying was, at its best, not great. But it seems at some point down the road the 'premature' part of that sentence was lost to history and it became something much worse. It goes some way towards explaining why we now need machines that would be considered supercomputers, just a couple of decades prior, to run a text editor. Unreal Engine is a beautiful example of this. The source code of that engine is absolutely full of 'premature optimizations.' For instance repeatedly converting a Quaternion to a Rotator (Euler angles) is basically never going to get red-lined on a profiler, let alone be a bottleneck. Yet there's a caching class used in the engine for this exact purpose. It's all of these little 'premature optimizations' that end up creating a system that runs vastly better than most any other engine out there, feature for feature.

mike_hock 3y ago
It's a dogma pendulum like "gotos are evil," "YAGNI," object-oriented design (is good/bad), etc. A pattern or anti-pattern gets identified and lessons drawn from it. Then people take the lesson as dogma and drive it to absurd extremes. Naturally this doesn't have the desired effect, and then the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater, people do the exact opposite and take that to absurd extremes. Caching potentially expensive (relatively speaking) operations isn't "premature optimization," it's a design principle. It's much harder to retrofit something like this into a project after the fact than having and using it from the start. "Premature optimization" is applying complicated micro-optimizations early on that won't survive any moderate code change.