Two Performance Aesthetics: Never Miss a Frame and Do Almost Nothing
http://thume.ca/2019/07/27/two-performance-aesthetics/ [thume.ca]
2019-07-29 00:58
I’ve noticed when I think about performance nowadays that I think in terms of two different aesthetics. One aesthetic, which I’ll call Never Miss a Frame, comes from the world of game development and is focused on writing code that has good worst case performance by making good use of the hardware. The other aesthetic, which I’ll call Do Almost Nothing comes from a more academic world and is focused on algorithmically minimizing the work that needs to be done to the extent that there’s barely any work left, paying attention to the performance at all scales. In this post I’ll describe the two aesthetics, look at some case studies of pairs of programs in different domains that follow different aesthetics, and talk about the trade-offs involved and how to choose which direction to lean for a project.
source: L