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by asa400 89 days ago
Fun story! Performance is often highly unintuitive, and even counterintuitive (e.g. going from C++ to Python). Very much an art as well as a science.

Crazy how many stories like this I’ve heard of how doing performance work helped people uncover bugs and/or hidden assumptions about their systems.
1 comments
staticassertion 89 days ago
It doesn't come off as unintuitive by my read. They had a bug that led to a massive performance regression. Rewriting the code didn't have that bug so it led to a performance improvement.

They found that they had fewer bugs in Python so they continued with it.

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harpiaharpyja 89 days ago
I think a lot of people (especially those who are only peripherally involved in development, like management) don't really consider performance regressions at all when thinking about how to get software to go faster.

Meanwhile my experience has been that whenever there has been a performance issue severe enough to actually matter, it's often been the result of some kind of performance bug, not so much language, runtime, or even algorithm choices for that matter.

Hence whenever the topic of how to improve performance comes up, I always, always insist that we profile first.

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staticassertion 89 days ago
My experience has been that performance bugs show up in lots of places and I'm very lucky when it's just a bug. The far more painful performance issues are language and runtime limitations.

But, of course, profiling is always step one.

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