Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement

Re:Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement by GrumpyYoungMan on Wednesday October 26, 2016 @11:08AM (#12797037)

You don't know what that Where() costs you, though. The abstraction in your second snippet does _at least_ as much work as the code in the first snippet _and_ has an unknown level of extra overhead.

Abstractions are not free. Because we can almost always afford the luxury of abstractions, some people forget that there's an engineering tradeoff there. There's always something underneath that nice, pretty-seeming abstraction that has to do the dirty work. Because that abstraction has to be pretty and handle generic situations, it (not always but often) can't be optimized to be more efficient in specific situations.

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Re:Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement by ehsanu1 on Wednesday October 26, 2016 @12:42PM (#12798031)

Zero-cost abstractions are a thing though. Compiler magic can even fuse together multiple calls like this on the same collection into the equivalent regular loop. So it can in fact be faster rather than slower, in the right context.

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