Performance and Optimization Isn’t Evil
Donald Knuth is a fairly amazing guy. I consider him one of the most influential contributors to computer science of all time. Unfortunately, most of the time I hear his name, I cringe. This is because it’s typically somebody quoting a small portion of one of his famous statements on optimization: “premature optimization is the root of all evil.â€
I mention that this is only a portion of the entire quote, and, as such, I feel that Knuth is being quoted out of context. Optimization is important. It is a critical part of every software development effort, and should never be ignored. A developer who ignores optimization is not a professional. Every developer should understand optimization – know what to optimize, when to optimize it, and how to think about code in a way that is intelligent and productive from day one. Read more
C# Performance Pitfall – Interop Scenarios Change the Rules
C# and .NET, overall, really do have fantastic performance in my opinion. That being said, the performance characteristics dramatically differ from native programming, and take some relearning if you’re used to doing performance optimization in most other languages, especially C, C++, and similar. However, there are times when revisiting tricks learned in native code play a critical role in performance optimization in C#.
I recently ran across a nasty scenario that illustrated to me how dangerous following any fixed rules for optimization can be…
