Performance excuses debunked

> So said brilliant engineer in Amsterdam, built an annealing algorithm in the release build to reorder the optimization passes in such a way to as minimize size. This shaved a whooping 11 MBs off the total machine code size and bought us enough runway to keep development going.

Wow. You know you have made bad choices when you need a desperation play like that.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#6

Post by typon » Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 9:45 PM UTC

I kind of wish Casey would stop making these videos. I'm being completely serious when I say that this kind of knowledge and mindset gives you pretty much a superpower in the industry. Everywhere I go people think I am amazing, even though I just know a few things about performance and low level programming (like, enough to be amazing for "mere mortals", but someone at RAD would snicker at my knowledge). If the industry doesn't care, it's simply a competitive advantage for you as an individual.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#7

Post by tmtvl » Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 10:19 PM UTC

I like the positive message he leaves us with: the barrier to entry for good performance is as low as it's ever been. You can get good performance without needing hand-coded assembly SIMD vector optimizations.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#8

Post by db48x » Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 10:38 PM UTC

typon wrote: post #6

I kind of wish Casey would stop making these videos. I'm being completely serious when I say that this kind of knowledge and mindset gives you pretty much a superpower in the industry. Everywhere I go people think I am amazing, even though I just know a few things about performance and low level programming (like, enough to be amazing for "mere mortals", but someone at RAD would snicker at my knowledge). If the indus…

I know what you mean; I’ve made a lot of money by cleaning up other people’s messes. Still, I’m pretty sure I’d prefer a world where software was just better overall and there were fewer messes.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#9

Post by paul_grisham » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 1:12 AM UTC

Obviously performance matters, it's just a question of opportunity cost. The article just takes some absolute statements about performance not mattering and argues against them, which is obvious and pointless. They ignore that the benefit/cost ratio for Facebook's performance improvements is vastly different to that of the average software company with tens of employees and some SaaS CRUD app. Their own example of Uber's app rewrite due to their previous architecture not being good enough is an example against their point - they got to where they were with imperfect architecture, then later fixed it once the opportunity cost tradeoff made sense.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#10

Post by alphanumeric0 » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 1:18 AM UTC

"With so much evidence refuting the five excuses, hopefully it is clear that they are ridiculous. They are completely invalid reasons for the average developer, in the common case, to dismiss concerns about software performance. They should not be taken seriously in a professional software development context."

I believe the average developer should care somewhat about performance, and depending on their industry they might need to care a lot, but I'm not so convinced for the average case.

The average developer is not working on FAANG-sized codebases. Also, I'd imagine any large systems built up over the years that are refactored would likely see great performance gains. That's just the nature of long-term software.