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Speed matters (2021)

(www.scattered-thoughts.net)
65 points mefengl | 4 comments | 16 Feb 25 08:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.687s | source
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inglor_cz ◴[20 Feb 25 05:51 UTC] No.43111564[source]▶
I agree fully. Speed matters. Too many people consider CPU time too cheap to consider. I still marvel at how fast and efficient could Symbian OS be on a 190 MHz Nokia. (Though the API was hell.)

That said, it is also true that premature optimization is the root of all evil.

I suspect programming wisdom hides somewhere in between those two hills, neither of which is worth dying on.

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1. Aurornis ◴[20 Feb 25 06:10 UTC] No.43111643[source]▶
Well the article is about speed of development, not the speed at which the code runs.

Over the years I’ve come to embrace moving fast and writing code quickly, even if it’s not the fastest. The faster I get the big things done, the more time I can spend optimizing what matters after I’ve identified it and determined it’s valuable.

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2. inglor_cz ◴[20 Feb 25 06:27 UTC] No.43111736[source]▶
There is an overlap.

Writing for PHP, I used to spend a lot of time waiting for Xdebug to trigger. Once the author released version 3.3, the improvement was so big that my own productivity went visibly up.

3. branko_d ◴[20 Feb 25 06:27 UTC] No.43111739[source]▶
On the other hand, some of the biggest performance wins come from the architectural choices, and those are often done before most of the code is written.
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4. whstl ◴[20 Feb 25 10:39 UTC] No.43113190[source]▶
Yep, same experience. "Some of the biggest performance wins" in both developer speed and processing speed.