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re-thctoday at 2:37 PM2 repliesview on HN

> I'm saying that most developers aren't writing code where layout is a primary contributor to the program's performance.

I've heard this theory before. This isn't just about performance and I don't buy it.

I've seen too many examples of this is just a temporary solution so it doesn't matter. >3 years later that "temporary solution" was still there and at the heart of many operations yet it's now to hard and too costly to fix.

I've also seen the this is a quick hack. No 1 uses it. It doesn't go through any hot paths. All good. You know what happens? Years later, every service literally goes through it. Again, it's too hard to fix.

In the real world these "theories" are really loose. The only fix is every should be aware of what they are doing and do it properly. The it might not happen, etc mindset is dangerous.


Replies

prontoday at 3:30 PM

This has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. I wasn't referring to people who think that program performance doesn't matter (although I'm sure there are many of those) but to people working on code that either doesn't impact the overall program's performance much or it does but not due to layout. The number of developers working on code where layout is a major contributor to performance is relatively low, and this includes people working on programs where layout does impact performance significantly (because even in such a program, that particular hot path is not touched by every developer).

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gf000today at 3:14 PM

Then what is it that you are saying? That I should use JMH to determine the best layout for my helper class that will be initialized 3 times? Like most of the software (by line of code) is boring plumbing from one service to another with some dumb business logic sprinkled in. Something like a single config option for your database driver matters orderS of magnitude more in many types of applications.

It's much more niche to work on stuff where such changes actually matter, like much much more people write boring CRUD backends than those who write physics simulators and audio processing pipelines combined.

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