> in addition to being vague and essentially meaningless in most contexts
It's not vague, it has a literal meaning. Efficient. The definition comes from the French word "performant", the meaning of which goes back to the 17th century.
This isn't people going "ohh it's related to performance, let's make up a word that sounds similar", like "supposably" or similar.
It's "Let's take an established word with the same roots that has the same meaning as we want and use it".
See a sister thread for commenters mock debating over whether it means improved throughput or reduced latency. If a speaker indeed intends to mean “efficient,” then it would be thoughtful to opt to instead use “efficient” for clarity’s sake. Performant has been so often recklessly used that the meaning has been diluted to mean general and vague “fastness,” from which most thoughtful people cannot glean any specific meaning.
Still better data than the literally nothing that you brought to the discussion so far.
> In nearly every instance it can be replaced with “good” or just dropped altogether with no loss of information,
That is obviously true and easily checkable. If that is not true, explain how in rational terms.
> Multigenerational LRU: more versatile, straightforward than Linux's
Neither of these have as much information as the original headline. The version I came up with that's actually equivalent to the original without using the word "performant" has to use a word that means the same thing.
> Multigenerational LRU: faster, more versatile, more straightforward than Linux's
And that still means I don't get to use the "parallel more" construct.
Starting with a few from the 70s:
The IEEE from 1979: https://books.google.com/books?id=IJ4XAQAAMAAJ&q=%22performa... "It should be noted that the problem of scailing is considerably simplified from the fact that the operators dispose of greater ranges ( from 1 to 238 for l - 20 , instead of 1 to 104 for the more performant analog computers "
We can even step outside of the electrical engineering community, here's a reference to it from the Iron and Steel society, in the same year: https://books.google.com/books?id=D9RaAAAAYAAJ&q=%22performa... "As this cooling system revealed itself as unsufficiently performant , we have started with the study of literature in order to define if other more efficient equipments were available"
We can push back to 1974, in relation to satellites in space: https://books.google.com/books?id=ZXHvAAAAMAAJ&q=%22performa... "So , the program is very descriptive in the effects development , and very performant . Furthermore , it has been compared with numerical integration at each step ( after the computation of each effect and each coupling )..."
Or just a little further in relation to APL from the ACM: https://books.google.com/books?id=0qApAQAAIAAJ&q=%22performa... "However , this theorical gain is nothing but an encouragement ; the execution phasis is very performant because , before it , a lot of preparation has been done during the deferment phasis : this should be taken into account in a realistic ..."
So in the 60s, 1964: https://books.google.com/books?id=l1_vAAAAMAAJ&q=%22performa... Such a progress comes partially from the availability of faster and larger computers and of more performant numerical methods . It is however important to remark that , at the same time , analytic progress has also been achieved , which is very ..."
Australian Mechanical Engineer are using it in relation to the Wankel engine, https://books.google.com/books?id=rzIiAQAAMAAJ&q=%22performa...
Judging from the uses I'm seeing in the Google search, it's a fair claim that Computer Science has been using "performant" in reference to efficiency and performance for most of its existence.
Judging people for using a word in a way that has that much history in the field tends to reflect mostly on you.