11-28-08 - Optimization

Yes yes, I'm generally in the "measure carefully and only optimize where needed" camp which the pretentious and condescending love. Weblog pedants love to point out pointless optimizations and say "did you really measure it?". Fie.

There's a great advantage to just blindly optimizing (as long as it doesn't severely cost you in terms of clarity or maintainability or simplicity). It lets you stop worrying. It frees up head space. Say you do some really inefficient string class and then you use it all over your code. Every time you use you have to wonder "is this okay? am I getting killed by this inefficient class?" and then you measure it, and no, it's fine. Then a month later you worry again. Then a month later you worry again. It gives you great peace of mind to know that all your base components are great. It lets you worry about the real issue, which is the higher level algorithm. (note that micro-optimizing the higher level algorithm prematurely is just always bad).