This attitude is how we get streaming music players that consume in excess of 1 GiB of RAM.

Performant code needn’t be unclean; it’s just often using deeper parts of the language.

I have a small project that became absolute spaghetti. I rewrote it to be modular, using lots of classes, inheritance, etc. It was then slower, but eminently more maintainable and extensible. I’m addressing that by using more advanced features of the language (Python), like MemoryView for IPC between the C libraries it calls. I don’t consider this unclean, but it’s certainly not something you’re likely to find on a Medium article or Twitter take.

I value performant code above nearly everything else. I’m doing this for me, there are no other maintainers, and it’s what I enjoy. You’re welcome to prioritize something else in your projects, but it doesn’t make other viewpoints objectively worse.

I suggest you run your browsers Javascript engine in interpreter mode to understand how crippling the simple and sraight forward solution is to performance.

I guess because at server farm level, performance/efficiency translate to real million USD savings. In general, at scale ends (the cloud and the embedded) this matters a lot. In resource limited environments like raspberry pi, this design philosophy wins over many users between DIY and the private industry.

> Performance can be bought with better hardware.

I hate this argument. If current hardware promises you a theoretical throughput of 100 MB/s for an operation, someone will try to hit that limit. Your program that has no hard to understand code but gives me 5 MB/s will loose in the face of a faster one, even if that means writing harder to understand code.

Faster and more complex hardware can also have bugs or back doors, as can cheaper hardware. That said, I'm not happy with buggy and untrustworthy code either.