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0 points_aavaa_1y ago0 comments

While gesturing at religion and saying he's a fundamentalist is an easy rhetorical technique, it doesn't add much. Yes good resources do exist, but they are few and far between. The number of new undergraduates from cs or software engineering who learned to think in the ways needed to make low latency applications are a rounding error based on my experience with them. Most forgot it, weren't taught it well, or never saw it at all. They are more worried about learning the syntax of the current hot framework rather than on anything even resembling "Avoid copies, never allocate, keep the hot path local".

The religious comparison is also a telling one given the state of the industry; for we aren't the theologian, we're the common folk looking for someone or something to follow in order to write better code.

Who are Casey's alternatives? Gesturing the cppcon as a learning resource has "read research papers to learn about a field" vibes. They can be highly informative and worth the effort, but not for beginners.

Who are Casey's contemporaries? If he's a fundamentalist then the atheists are nowhere to be seen by the beginners. Instead we have agile ceremony shamans, clean code bible missionaries, tdd doomsday cults, oop/rust/haskell/etc. zealots, a thriving megachurch industry of Lambda schools, and the mother of all cargo cults masquerading as web dev.

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fsloth1y ago

Agree there are not enough performance zealots. Modern architectures are almost magically fast if you get all of the tiny invisible things that kill your performance sorted out correctly. The fact that the knowledge of how to achieve this is closer to black magic lore than foundational educational knowledge is sad.

Performance is surprisingly often a feature. When things become instantly fast, instead of horribly slow, new opportunities are suddenly feasible for a lot of things.

_aavaa_OP1y ago

> The fact that the knowledge of how to achieve this is closer to black magic lore than foundational educational knowledge is sad.

It is sad, doubly so since the things you need to get within an order of magnitude of what your hardware can do aren't the arcane assembly and "premature optimization" boogeymen students picture. Forget the 10x engineer, going from the 0.0001x engineer to the 0.1x would be a massive improvement and it's low hanging fruit.

They're simple things: have your code do less, learn what good performance should be, understand the hardware and internalize that the point is to program it, and use/build better tools (e.g. perhaps your programming model is fundamentally flawed if it essentially incentivizes things like the N+1 Selects Problem).

> Performance is surprisingly often a feature.

Performance is, unsurprisingly, often a missing feature in most software. Every day I need to boot up Teams I feel we stray further from Moore's light.

fsloth1y ago

Totally agree on all points!

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0 points_aavaa_1y ago0 comments

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fsloth1y ago

Performance is surprisingly often a feature. When things become instantly fast, instead of horribly slow, new opportunities are suddenly feasible for a lot of things.

_aavaa_OP1y ago

> The fact that the knowledge of how to achieve this is closer to black magic lore than foundational educational knowledge is sad.

> Performance is surprisingly often a feature.

Performance is, unsurprisingly, often a missing feature in most software. Every day I need to boot up Teams I feel we stray further from Moore's light.

fsloth1y ago

Totally agree on all points!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse