this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
29 points (100.0% liked)

Learn Programming

1640 readers
1 users here now

Posting Etiquette

  1. Ask the main part of your question in the title. This should be concise but informative.

  2. Provide everything up front. Don't make people fish for more details in the comments. Provide background information and examples.

  3. Be present for follow up questions. Don't ask for help and run away. Stick around to answer questions and provide more details.

  4. Ask about the problem you're trying to solve. Don't focus too much on debugging your exact solution, as you may be going down the wrong path. Include as much information as you can about what you ultimately are trying to achieve. See more on this here: https://xyproblem.info/

Icon base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Ategon
JaumeI
bugsmith
29
How do I learn to optimize my code better? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/learn_programming
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I'm trying to make minesweeper using rust and bevy, but it feels that my code is bloated (a lot of for loops, segments that seem to be repeating themselves, etc.)

When I look at other people's code, they are using functions that I don't really understand (map, zip, etc.) that seem to make their code faster and cleaner.

I know that I should look up the functions that I don't understand, but I was wondering where you would learn stuff like that in the first place. I want to learn how to find functions that would be useful for optimizing my code.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

The functions you've called out are higher order functions regularly associated with the functional programming paradigm. "In the first place" for a lot of people would be a functional programming course at a university.

For your specific case, rust (like a few other languages) implements these through iterator programming. There's a section in the rust book that might help.

Apart from academia you learn from experience, including a healthy amount of reading other people's code, just like you did to find out about these functions in the first place!

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Also, with Rust, if you're optimizing for performance and not legibility, it's actually pretty important to not prematurely optimize. Its type system gives the compiler a lot of information to work with, and it does a really good job finding places where code can be optimized.

What might make sense in some languages, such as trying to cache small strings instead of recomputing them, can actually hurt performance by preventing the compiler from using certain optimizations.