51–60 of 130 posts
Absolutely hilarious and ridiculous to claim that Facebook cares about iOS app performance. In reality they have a few dozen people who care making heroic technical fixes to mitigate the damage of thousands of people adding mountains of mediocre crap to the apps. If you care about performance from the beginning, you would never even get to the point where you’re saying “oh crap, our messenger app can barely run, let’…
Scale / data set size tends to expose performance issues. But that's a good problem to have. Yes, it would be great if all developers could write performant code, but let's face it - there's only so many hours in a day and days in a week. Developers already struggle to keep up with all the required knowledge. It's not that people don't want to be competent. We're building more and more complex things while expanding…
So if most people unlearned the _more complex_ way of programming, they might end up with simpler _and_ faster code.
I’ve never seen anyone make the argument that performance is not important. I have seen people make the argument that performance is less imprtant than some other property (maintainability, extensibility, legibility etc. etc.) given certain aims and constraints.
If you say that maintainability, extensibility, legibility etc. etc. is more important than performance then you are, in fact, saying that performance is NOT important.
But those are mostly just the excuses that Casey is ranting about.
There's nothing inherent in writing fast code that makes is not maintainable, not extensible, not legible not etc., not etc.
In fact, the things that make code less maintainable and less legible are often the things that make is slower.
Things like replacing new Foo() with FooFactory and replacing FooFactory with FooFactoryProvider and then encoding logic in XML files.
Those are things that people do way more often that writing SIMD intrinsic.
And there are those who way overemphasize supposed "legibility" over performance.
In JavaScript land you get legion claiming that the world will end if they rewrite unnecessarily slow map(), filter(), forEach() etc. with a regular for loop.
Performance matters, but I’m not sure people are saying that it doesn’t. I’m not a performance “first” type of programmer by any means, but I always keep it in the back of my mind, what I also tend to keep in the back of my mind is cost. I recently “inherited” a couple of back-end services when a developer left our company. It turned out that the code was terrible and that they haven’t used, any, or our helper tools.…
In my career I've meet people who genuinely don't care about performance. For them code either works or doesn't. Back in the days when everyone used bare hardware if a developer would push a change which suddenly requires 10x more hardware (or makes 10x more requests to other's team service) it would break the system and force to do something about it - either order more hardware (takes time) or fix the software (usually faster). Nowadays cloud would auto-scale and such change would go unnoticed, the only difference will be the next month's cloud bill.
I’ve never seen anyone make the argument that performance is not important. I have seen people make the argument that performance is less imprtant than some other property (maintainability, extensibility, legibility etc. etc.) given certain aims and constraints.
So the biggest tech companies in the world, now that they are huge, are making their programs faster. OK. To me, that says maybe the reason they beat their competition to becoming huge, was that they wrote a lot of features quickly and didn't nitpick about performance. Maybe the ones that wrote efficient high performance code from the start stayed small or were out-competed.
It bothers me that all the examples provided shows that companies care about performance ("Company $X made their app 20% faster"), but none of them talks about the impact of caring about performance ("Company $X made their app 20% faster, and saw a 200% increase in revenue as a result")
But Ockham Razor tells us they did spend significant effort on performance because they had a reason to do it.
Absolutely hilarious and ridiculous to claim that Facebook cares about iOS app performance. In reality they have a few dozen people who care making heroic technical fixes to mitigate the damage of thousands of people adding mountains of mediocre crap to the apps. If you care about performance from the beginning, you would never even get to the point where you’re saying “oh crap, our messenger app can barely run, let’…
What is funny is many of the exact excuses were made in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34966137