Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by musicale 2318 days ago
> it is no better or worse than other words/phrases having the same meaning

It is demonstrably worse than phrases like "low latency" which clarify the desired property of the system being discussed.

I'm not a huge fan of "high performance" but at least I kind of know what "high performance computing" means (usually systems that are capable of processing massive data sets with high throughput.)

In contrast, "performant" as it is commonly (mis)used doesn't seem have a precise meaning other than "good according to some unspecified metric."

1 comments

What do you mean by "low latency"? Low latency before the user sees anything? Low latency before the user can interact with the app? Low latency navigating to the next page? It's hard to answer every conceivable question in a headline.

Everything is vague to some degree. The hand-wringing over "performant" is just a meme.