[osd]

No, no no no.

I cannot believe that you are honestly saying a 2x increase to throughput in production is something you "shouldn't take seriously" because the code isn't as readable as it was before.

Programmers are expensive. Hardware is cheap. That doesn't justify completely throwing out the window any performance increasing changes just because a fresh college grad won't be able to understand what's going on within 10 minutes.

[Someone1234]

> I cannot believe that you are honestly saying a 2x increase to throughput in production is something you "shouldn't take seriously" because the code isn't as readable as it was before.

I've worked on large and old codebases for years. I've seen plenty of examples of where a "clever" programmer has optimised the heck out of a section of code, made it completely unmaintainable, and as a result forced a re-write (the resulting code, which was slower, was also easier to maintain and reason about).

"Production" is a meaningless rallying cry. Everything is production sooner or later. Not everything needs to be fast, although there are critical areas of a typical project that do. It is really a question of code quality relative to performance, unless performance itself is actually causing you problems. Typically these overeager performance fixes are done to code preemptively.

This is all fine for your pet and toy projects, go work on something enterprise grade. Big code means clean code. I'd take ten lines of clean easy to consume code over one "clever" line of genius.

[hdhzy]

I don't know your experiences but the "performance optimizations" that I've seen lacked obvious technical support around it. Usually people thought "it will be faster" without using profiler (sin no 1) or did not properly isolate and control the performance critical part of the code (making performance tests part of the build etc.). But these are other issues separate from optimizing code.

The usual caveat of making code correct, readable and then fast in this order of course also applies :)