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How do I learn to optimize my code better? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm trying to make minesweeper using rust and bevy, but it feels that my code is bloated (a lot of for loops, segments that seem to be repeating themselves, etc.)

When I look at other people's code, they are using functions that I don't really understand (map, zip, etc.) that seem to make their code faster and cleaner.

I know that I should look up the functions that I don't understand, but I was wondering where you would learn stuff like that in the first place. I want to learn how to find functions that would be useful for optimizing my code.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

The functions you've called out are higher order functions regularly associated with the functional programming paradigm. "In the first place" for a lot of people would be a functional programming course at a university.

For your specific case, rust (like a few other languages) implements these through iterator programming. There's a section in the rust book that might help.

Apart from academia you learn from experience, including a healthy amount of reading other people's code, just like you did to find out about these functions in the first place!

[–] pivot_root 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Also, with Rust, if you're optimizing for performance and not legibility, it's actually pretty important to not prematurely optimize. Its type system gives the compiler a lot of information to work with, and it does a really good job finding places where code can be optimized.

What might make sense in some languages, such as trying to cache small strings instead of recomputing them, can actually hurt performance by preventing the compiler from using certain optimizations.