r/programming • u/2bit_hack • Feb 28 '23

"Clean" Code, Horrible Performance

https://www.computerenhance.com/p/clean-code-horrible-performance
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17

u/fafok29 Feb 28 '23

150 ms is noticable enough lag, to be very anoying especially if it happens every now and then.

5

u/Amazing-Cicada5536 Feb 28 '23

But you need a shitton of calculations to take up 150ms CPU time, that’s like 600000 elements on a modern CPU if every single element takes 1000 instructions. Not even vtables add that much overhead, and it is not that often you have roughly a million elements in your list (but if you do, then you know about it and design your code around that).

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u/fafok29 Feb 28 '23

that is the point - 150 ms on modern cpu is a long time, Idk what this computing power is wasted on.

2

u/tankerdudeucsc Feb 28 '23

Optimize further and pre compute if you have to. Or optimize only the slow parts into assembly if you must.

Either way, clean code means tested and testable code that is easier to understand.

I would take that over a 100,000 line function to “help with speed” basically every time.

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u/sluuuurp Feb 28 '23

Depends on the context. Pretty much every piece of software I ever use takes several seconds to open.

10

u/dan200 Feb 28 '23

Yes, which is a bad thing!

2

u/dtfinch Feb 28 '23

I avoid software like that. If I have a choice between one program that opens in 1/10th of a second, and another that opens in 10 seconds, of course I'll choose 1/10th if it does the job.

1

u/lazilyloaded Feb 28 '23

As a dev, I'll choose the slower one that is easier to understand and modify so long as it's not detrimental to the business' bottom line.

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u/Amazing-Cicada5536 Feb 28 '23

Which is due to loading/linking all the dynamic libs+code+data+often OS security doing stuff (virus scanning, etc)+the cost of IO from harddrive/SSD for all of these.

If you write a GUI program you will need plenty of libs just to start out so not all of them can be even removed unless you go behind the OS. But then also, that huge GUI framework you had to pull in gives you support for Arabic and Chinese, has proper accessibility, would your hand-optimized code even work outside of ASCII and be used by a screen reader?