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Comment by metafunctor | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone give examples of cases where “performant” would be better than “efficient”?

To my mind, the difference is that “performant” delivers results quickly, whereas “efficient” uses little energy. A performant solution might be efficient, but not necessarily, and vice versa. Does anyone else share this understanding or am I living in a linguistic bubble?

Not sure about Swedish (Daniel is Swedish), but in Finnish, we have the word “suorituskykyinen”, meaning “efficient” or “able to perform”. I can see how Finnish writers might want to use “performant” to replace this commonly used word. Perhaps there's a similar history for Swedish speakers? I sure have seen “performant” a lot in academic texts written by Finnish and Swedish speakers in the last 20 years.

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    efficiency = performance / resources

Efficient has connotations of economy, of optimal use of resources but with a hint of parsimony - another way to get efficiency is to reduce the denominator.

Performant emphasises the numerator much more.

*increase the denominator.

nitpick aside, agreed

Reducing the denominator is the other way to increase efficiency. The denominator is the number under the line, the divisor.

The denominator is "resources," which here means "resource cost." Increasing resource cost reduces efficiency. You want to either increase the numerator ("performance") or decrease the denominator ("resources").

Yep. A top fuel dragster goes from 0-60 mph (~0-100 kmh) in about 0.2 seconds, but it will use about 20 gallons (~75 liters) of fuel going 1,000 ft (~300 m). Very high performance. Very low efficiency.

"My mining algorithm, which uses a lot more CPU and memory, is more performant." The key being that performant is often associated w/ speed (i.e. higher performing) whereas efficient ambiguously can refer to many things you have improved on.

Yep, that's how I understand the word “performant” as well. A car that accelerates from 0-100 kph in under 3 seconds would be ”performant”. A car is “efficient” if it burns less than 4 liters of gasoline per 100 kilometers.

'performs more [efficiently|accuratley]' would be proper english (not that i speak it well.... :D).

webster says:

"performant"

The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary. Click on a spelling suggestion below or try again using the search bar above.

    preformant performance performing performances performable preformants perforate conformant perform formant performed informant performer perforata performers performs preformat

The algorithm doesn't perform more efficiently or accurately, though - it's less efficient (it uses more resources) and it should be the same accuracy (or we're comparing apples with oranges).

haha yah i know, it would perform terrible. imagine running a big dns server at ISP level, and having to perform 9 million tls handshakes a second. have fun with that lol. this was just an example of how to avoid the 'performant' word.

If we’re getting pedantic about linguistics, wouldn’t that be, “it would perform terribly” instead of “it would perform terrible”?

In my understanding, performance is based on the value of a measure improving in one way or another.

Efficiency is relative to the amount of resources required to achieve a similar result. To use the car example above, a car that can do 100km/h at 4L/100km is more efficient than another can than do 100km/h at 8L/100km.

The point of absolute efficiency is referred to as optimum. Essentially, top performance possible with the minimum of resources possible.

I think the word that was being grasped for is 'faster'.

It suffers in that doesn't sound very technical.

GPU can perform more operations than CPU, but GPU is slower than CPU, not faster.

Yes, throughput vs latency is a very important distinction. An airplane is always faster then a train, but if what you are measuring is throughput, a train can be more performant. It depends on the context, but that's fine. There is no such thing as a made-up word if the word has a meaning, and is regularly used by a group of people.

So is the GPU more or less 'performant?'

That's right - the CPU is faster at completing the job, though the GPU executes instructions more quickly.

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