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"In established engineering disciplines a 12% improvement, easily obtained, is never considered marginal; and I believe the same viewpoint should prevail in sof
by zogrodea 3y ago
"In established engineering disciplines a 12% improvement, easily obtained, is never considered marginal; and I believe the same viewpoint should prevail in software engineering." - Also Knuth
- eru 3y agoA 12% overall improvement might be worthwhile. But you have to look at the bigger picture: if part A of your project takes 99.9% of the time, and part B takes 0.1% of the time, even a 100% improvement in part B (ie making it take 0 time) might not be worthwhile.
- jackthetab 3y agoa.k.a. [Amdahl's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law)
- jononor 3y agoI agree. But it is critical to ensure that what one is improving is something worthwhile. 12% improvement in compute costs for a project with lots of compute spend = massive win. 12% improvement in compute costs for a hobby project running on a single VM = probably negligible. 12% improvement in function runtime some arbitrary place in the stack = possibly net negative, taking into account developer opportunity costs. It is almost always useful to talk in terms of outcomes, ie benefits to customer/users/team/company.
- erk__ 3y agoThe original quote is not by Knuth, though he made it well known, it is by Tony Hoare.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoAny improvement is significant!! I spent a week implementing an optimization for my language (pypy's storage strategies) and ended up significantly slowing it down instead. It's not guaranteed. I have massive respect for anyone who can pull off steady improvements, no matter how small.