11
going fast is about doing less
(youtu.be)
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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Programming
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I keep telling noobs that writing code is like 10% of what they do, and each line of code is a millstone round their neck. Terse, optimal performance (not optimized!) code meeting user requirements is the route to success. And so, doing less is how to go faster, but not what the video means
Now, I am just a modder and not a full blown dev or anything, but I've always questioned others who critcized my scripts and suggested much more complicated ways of doing the same thing. Like I can do exactly what I wanted with 1 line of code, and someone would come in and say "do it this way for better results" and it's 6 lines of crap that ends up working exactly the same. Why?! Especially when this was for a game that has a notoriously slow script engine, meaning more lines of code = slower, no matter what you were doing.
That single line of code may be using a slow abstraction, doesn't cover edge cases, has no caching of reused values, has no optimization for the common path, or any other number of issues. Thus being slower, fragile, or sometimes not even solving the problem it's meant to solve.
More often than not performance and robustness comes at a significant increase to the amount of code you have to write in high level languages... Performance optimizations especially.
A high performance parser I was involved in writing was nearly 60x the amount of code (~12k LOC) of the lowest LOC solution you could make (~200LOC), but also several orders of magnitude faster. It also covered more edge cases, and could short circuit to more optimal paths during parsing, increasing the performance for common use cases which had optimized code written just for them.
It doesn't. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of software engineering and is flawed in almost every way. To the point of it being an armchair statement. Often this is even objectively provable...
This makes me feel better about my if..then..else walls.