this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
10 points (91.7% liked)

Programming

355 readers
1 users here now

This magazine is dedicated to discussions on programming languages, software development, and coding. Whether you are a beginner programmer or an experienced developer, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as coding languages, software engineering, web development, and more. From the latest trends and frameworks to tips and tricks for debugging, this category covers a wide range of topics related to programming.

founded 2 years ago
10
"Clean" Code, Horrible Performance (www.computerenhance.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Many programming "best practices" taught today are performance disasters waiting to happen.

related article:
SE Radio 577: Casey Muratori on Clean Code, Horrible Performance?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

What a dumb article. Sounds like an old C graybeard who's never understood the point of proper type safety or readable code. None of the performance gains the author talks about actually matter, whereas the entire point of clean code is to make it easier to read and maintain by other programmers. Let's also not forget this important quote from Donald Knuth: "premature optimization is the root of all evil".

Simply put, unless you're working in extremely resource-constrained systems, or have some code snippet being run an incredibly large number of times over a humongous amount of data, these kinds of performance optimizations simply don't matter and you get more benefit from writing the code in a way that reduces bugs and is easier to read. Heck, most of the time compiler optimizations make this entire argument moot anyway.