DEV Community

Discussion on: An example of why performance matters (with Python and Rust)

Collapse
 
alainvanhout profile image
Alain Van Hout

That's where 'fast enough' comes in: if it takes you a minute to read the documentation, another minute or two to mentally parse the code and 15 minutes of carefully checking your changes, and perhaps 2 days debugging to notice what is actually wrong, then what point is a 2 ms speedup for something that likely has no gain from that speedup? (Which is far too common an occurrence)

Or more concisely: too many people have wasted too many hours due someone who felt a need to be clever.

There are of course plenty of situations where performance is really needed. And there it's worth investing the time to do benchmarking and properly document the code. But most of the time, I'd be grateful if code were maintainable rather than clever.

Thread Thread
 
rhymes profile image
rhymes

I totally agree with you, only a comment:

That's where 'fast enough' comes in: if it takes you a minute to read the documentation, another minute or two to mentally parse the code and 15 minutes of carefully checking your changes, and perhaps 2 days debugging to notice what is actually wrong, then what point is a 2 ms speedup for something that likely has no gain from that speedup? (Which is far too common an occurrence)

Well yes, if the speed up of the oneliner is 2ms then no, it's definitely not worth it. The only upside in your case is that you might have gain a better knowledge of the system but that's due to the 2 days of debugging, not due to the oneliner :D

Thread Thread
 
alainvanhout profile image
Alain Van Hout

Indeed :-)