Re:“Clean” Code, Horrible Performance
by TeMPOraL on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @06:12PM
(#34976273)
It's the same problem. Virtual calls are degenerate, in-process RPCs. Or put another way, the reason you make tons of RPCs is the same reason you make tons of virtual calls: you consider services or subclasses to be cheap, so you use them a lot to mold your systems to organizational/people problems instead of the thing the software is supposed to do.
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IMO the main difference is that for ~98% of people writing code, subclasses actually are very cheap. The performance losses (11 cycles per iteration?) aren't enough to dissuade me from organizing my code cleanly.
It's more than performance. Some of the worst code I've worked on has had too many layers of sub-classes, making it difficult to navigate and a real loss to developer productivity. After a certain point, it becomes OO spaghetti or, more accurately, "lasagna." At more than 3 layers, you really need to stop and think if it's necessary.