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Comment by lhecker | Hacker News Reader

So your opinion is "If it's slow it's okay, because it's safer than optimizing?".

I'm sorry but I have to disagree completely...

I'm currently rewriting the node-postgres module from scratch and my implementation is between 3 and >1000 times faster than the original (this is not even a joke). And you know why? Because the original actually contains those hacks you're talking about and not the other way around.

And that's where your actual noticable inefficiencies far too often stem from: Inexperienced developers who don't know how to do it the easy way - inefficiencies due to huge workarounds that have hidden costs.

E.g.: Not using builtin methods but writing buggy workarounds. Or even very basic stuff like: Using expensive functions within loops instead of hoisting those outside of it.

I wouldn't even call those "optimizations".

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>So your opinion is "If it's slow it's okay, because it's safer than optimizing?".

No. My opinion is that if it's slow you need to check to see if it's actually a problem for the users first before optimizing. Unless...

>And that's where your actual noticable inefficiencies far too often stem from: Inexperienced developers who don't know how to do it the easy way

I already said this below:

>Cleaning up dirty code that incidentally causes performance improvements is fine

> No. My opinion is that if it's slow you need to check to see if it's actually a problem for the users first before optimizing.

Not only. Think of all these seconds of computing time, translated into watts, translated into coal or whatever pollution from electricity production, multiplied by the number of users your program has.

I think programmers should also consider the environment, even if it'd have more impact if everyone started by just not owning a car.

Unless we're talking about optimizing stuff that actually takes 100% of the CPU's or graphics card's power, it'd have more impact if just one person started not owning a car. Or even merely used it a bit less.

Appreciate the sentiment but it's not going to achieve anything. "Tut-tut" attitude is a lot less efficient than simply showing people why it's worth optimizing for their own sake. If it's worth optimizing at all, that is - GP's point is that it's not always worth it. Optimization has a cost. Development cost and maintenance cost. What's the point of making a program faster if nobody can ever really work on that piece of the code again?

By the way, the hour the programmer stays in the office overtime to optimize that code, using computers and lights and other machines, probably damages the environment more than your example before...

> By the way, the hour the programmer stays in the office overtime to optimize that code, using computers and lights and other machines, probably damages the environment more than your example before...

What if we're talking about the file-copy API in some widely distributed operating system? That's going to be multiplied by millions and millions of people, and therefore, being an obtuse devil's advocate, i argue that indeed it would have an appreciable impact on the environment.

If, however, you're talking about some relatively infrequently used GUI element in an application which has merely a million users, then okay, indeed, go home and don't waste another hour of lights and computers at your office :).

Nobody (hopefully!) is defending important library optimizations.

The kind of unnecessary optimizations I think about as being undesirable are when you spend a week's worth of engineering effort and go through a potentially risky data migration just in order to improve the performance of a command-line production environment management tool that is run once per few months, that only takes a few minutes to run anyway, and whose data is cached server-side by the application running it anyway.

Actual example from my software engineering career.

But for library code, that potentially thousands or even millions of systems in production worldwide are going to be using? Hell yes. That is worth the time to improve. And kudos to you on improving Node postgres performance. That's awesome.

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