The Relationship of Simplicity and Performance

[ryanfleury]

Fishbowled on 2021-05-22:
https://discord.com/channels/239737791225790464/707742863076622358/845391778659958854

---

Clarifying my view on the nature of Handmade and its relationship with performance + simplicity:

It is also not just about performance.
The original Handmade manifesto talks a lot about performance, and don't get me wrong, that's a huge issue with modern software.
But most of performance is simplicity, and most friction we deal with as programmers comes from lack of simplicity.
Understanding the generic things beneath you, e.g. generic allocators in the CRT (malloc and free), and what they are built for, and how they are built, makes it much easier to actually prefer something simpler, and therefore much faster and better for the problem at hand.
Basically, Handmade is not anti-abstraction, it's anti-not-understanding-your-abstractions.
So it's not opposed to "hey I just used this STL hash table because I didn't care", or something, but it is opposed to saying something like "just use the generic STL hash table, you will never need to care"
Because the reality is, when you do care, it can lead to much faster, much simpler, much easier-to-understand, and much easier-to-debug results.
With the theory that this leads to faster iterations, better performance, less overhead, more reliability, and therefore better quality for the end user.
Another way to put it is that Handmade is about evaluating foundations, and it was an inseparable part of how we got to the idea of Dion.
"Just use the abstraction, you don't need to worry about the details" is what leads to nobody ever making a better version of the underlying layers, and Dion is all about making a better version of the underlying layers we use to program.
And, again, "better" doesn't just mean faster.

Participants:

ryanfleury
Allen4th
bvisness
rexollycounty
???

[rfaile313]

Simplicity scales :)

[ghost]

I've been thinking about this for a long time. Can I request to be on the participants list for this one? Not sure how it works.

[ryanfleury]

Yep, been waiting for people to ask! Will add you to the list Allen.

[CaptainKraft]

I think there may be a middle ground between "hey I just used this STL hash table because I didn't care" and "just use the generic STL hash table, you will never need to care"

The latter is probably what most people do, but I think something more like "I'll just use the generic SDL hash table so that I can get this done, and hopefully I'll never have to care. If it becomes a problem, then I will go deeper." would sometimes be better than not getting things done until you understand how something you're using works.

That was just a thought I had while reading this. I'm looking forward to the fishbowl 👍