From: William Paulson <billpaulson@...>
Date: 2012-06-21T01:42:35+09:00
Subject: Re: Benchmark obsession?

I'd say more like a "common fallacy" than an obsession. Indeed, it's a common problem across all languages, not just Ruby. I recall advice in Basic that said "don't use new lines unless you need a label." In thirty years of coding and performance evaluation, I can't recall a case where micro-tuning was sufficient to solve a performance issue, yet there are many times I've seen it used.

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 20, 2012, at 11:02 AM, Robert Klemme <shortcutter@googlemail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 4:43 PM, Jan E. <lists@ruby-forum.com> wrote:
>> After having read this list for a while, I wonder why some of you put so
>> much weight on speed optimizations.
> 
> I can't say I have observed an _obsession_ with things like these.
> Maybe it's just the fun or that it is so easy to Benchmark. :-)
> 
>> I'm not talking about big things
>> that really make sense but small stuff like "Don't use symbols, they
>> can't be garbage collected",
> 
> That is certainly a stupid general rule because in some situations
> this is exactly what you want: identifiers which do not need to be
> created and which are not GC'ed.
> 
>> "Don't concatenate strings, use string
>> interpolation instead", "Don't use Enumerable#inject to build up
>> objects" etc. etc.
> 
> As I said, I don't have made the same observation you apparently have
> made.  I do not read most of the traffic here but if it really was
> obsessive I think I would have noticed.  Strange how perceptions can
> be so different.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> robert
> 
> -- 
> remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
> http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/
>