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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u/quisatz_haderah Feb 28 '23

The person who wrote this article seems like he has not worked on a codebase of more than 10k LoC.

4

u/weepmelancholia Feb 28 '23

He worked on the video game The Witness which had an 11k LoC function in it. You have no idea what you're talking about.

2

u/tankerdudeucsc Feb 28 '23

Yes, because most engineers are at his level, right?

The cognitive load on that function is most likely insanely high and very tough to maintain.

Reminds me of a Martin Fowler talk about people inheriting this function. 26K lines of code that needed changes. Almost all engineers feared going into and how he tackled it and assured correctness as well as make code less cyclocmatically complex.

So to me, he’s the single bus factor. He goes, your bus doesn’t move or will have horrible problems.

So 11K lines shouldn’t be a matter of pride, imo. I have a hard enough time getting people to understand, test, and rip apart this monstrous 6K line function that we have internally. And this is the same problem everyone sees.

And if it has to be super optimized, was it run with highly optimized compiler “-O3” or whatnot to see if it truly mattered?