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Ok, a bit more detail then. :) Architecting for performance means picking your data structures, data flow, and algorithms with some thought towards efficiency

Ok, a bit more detail then. :) Architecting for performance means picking your data structures, data flow, and algorithms with some thought towards efficiency for the application you have in mind. Details will vary a lot depending on context. But as many folks have said, this sort of thing can't be done after the fact. As for "doing something dumb", I've often seem fellow engineers do things like repeatedly insert into sorted data structures in a loop instead of just inserting into an unsorted structure and then sorting after the inserts. If you think about it for just a minute, it should be obvious why that's not smart (for most cases.) Stuff like that. What do I mean by "micro-optimizations"? Taking a clearly written function and spending a lot of time making it as efficient _as_possible_ (possibly at the expense of clarity) without first doing some performance analysis to see if it matters. Nobody's saying to pick suboptimal solutions at all.

ragnese 2y ago
> As for "doing something dumb", I've often seem fellow engineers do things like repeatedly insert into sorted data structures in a loop instead of just inserting into an unsorted structure and then sorting after the inserts. If you think about it for just a minute, it should be obvious why that's not smart (for most cases.) Stuff like that. That's a great example that I've seen in the wild as well! > Nobody's saying to pick suboptimal solutions at all. No, I realize that. And most of my comment wasn't intended as some kind of direct disagreement to yours. It was mostly just some observations. One of which is that advice about writing efficient code is usually too vague to be useful, and the other is that people take the "don't optimize without measuring" advice to mean something ridiculous in the opposite extreme that reads more like "just write whatever garbage looks pretty to you because any forethought about what makes sense to the computer is premature optimization". I wasn't trying to say that's what you were advocating for, though.

ragnese 2y ago

> As for "doing something dumb", I've often seem fellow engineers do things like repeatedly insert into sorted data structures in a loop instead of just inserting into an unsorted structure and then sorting after the inserts. If you think about it for just a minute, it should be obvious why that's not smart (for most cases.) Stuff like that. That's a great example that I've seen in the wild as well! > Nobody's saying to pick suboptimal solutions at all. No, I realize that. And most of my comment wasn't intended as some kind of direct disagreement to yours. It was mostly just some observations. One of which is that advice about writing efficient code is usually too vague to be useful, and the other is that people take the "don't optimize without measuring" advice to mean something ridiculous in the opposite extreme that reads more like "just write whatever garbage looks pretty to you because any forethought about what makes sense to the computer is premature optimization". I wasn't trying to say that's what you were advocating for, though.