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by molotovbliss 2903 days ago
Having optimized others code before. https://magento.stackexchange.com/a/13992/69

Those who slam spaghetti code. Posit: Lasagna is just spaghetti flavored cake. Too many abstracted layers to fulfill a request. Down the layers, & back up, just to fulfill a simple request.

Autoloading can be expensive as well for I/O until cache is involved, especially with large code pools. Caching isn't optimization.

Trim the fat, reduce layers, use leaner pasta & or less special sauce.

If you've started tweaking costs/time from the ingredients & cooking process (lower level, OS, daemons, etc.) to start then move onto frameworks/libraries; it's less to consume & healthier. Ie., cache invalidation is much faster which should be at the end of your optimization journey.

Fundamentals are being abstracted away daily, while it's great for rapid prototyping & easier maintenance of code. It's imperative to understand problem spaces before delivering a solution.

A very highly recommended book is:

The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004HHORGA/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_...

The demo scene is a very good example to attempt to mimic with the culture of optimization. It's been bragging rights way early on. https://www.pouet.net/ granted hardware is much faster than it was back in the olden days. But a quick note from admiring their creations you get a taste for older hardware & milking every cycle you can. Maybe forcing younger up & coming devs to use older hardware means they'll appreciate it more & you'll know on current hardware it'll fly.

Another thing to think of is the von Neumann bottleneck & how it was solved (partially) with cache levels or Harvard architecture. I/O is a basis for optimization.

"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture

With all of the above said, I'm agreeing whole heatedly with the article & yourself as it's nice to see others focused on this as it seems to be a dieing breed.

I'll leave this here for web developers: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com