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Premature optimization (self.quotes)

submitted 1 year ago by MarvinTheBot to c/quotes

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Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth

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[–] aloso 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Unfortunately, this quote is often taken out of context to argue that optimization is not important. Here's the full quote:

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

In other words, you should optimize your code after you have profiled your program to find out which sections are most performance-sensitive, and you should use benchmarks to verify that the optimizations you have applied are beneficial.