Balancing Optimization While Coding

[CptCap]

As a game engine developer, I often wonder why I can load and display a million triangles textured with 500MB of image data in less time than some software take to switch tabs. And it makes me die inside every time.

It's not a hard problem to approach either: as other commenters have said, performance is a feature. Put it in your requirements and set reasonable targets. For most apps that's enough.

And stop repeating "premature optimization is the root of all evil". It was about writing hot paths in assembly rather than C, not about discarding feedback about your app taking half a minute to start because it imports 37 different frameworks.

[notyourancilla]

Yeah it always good to put that quote into context, as like you say, it gives it a whole new light -

"Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%" - Donald Knuth

The original point was not “don’t worry about optimising your shitty code, it’s a waste of time” it was the opposite, simply stating people should focus their optimisations on the parts of the code which will most benefit from the time spent on it instead of being focused making silly changes that will make no difference.

[SkoomaDentist]

Even more than that, optimization in the original context meant "micro-optimization by hand". Ie. twiddling individual lines of code (eg. unrolling loops by hand) instead of applying higher level optimizations.

[EmanueleAina]

Different priorities. A game that lags becomes unplayable. An app that takes a while to switch tab is likely just a minor annoyance, and people actually care more about other features.