Re:Don't Be Afraid of Types
by eventualcomp on Sunday March 23, 2025 @01:50AM
(#43451120)
This conversation thread reminds me of the very interesting and insightful talk here: Klaus Iglberger “Free Your Functions!” [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLDT1lDOsb4.
But you're right that it's commonly nice to operate on sets of things instead of individual things. If I were offsetting millions of points repeatedly, I'd look hard for a good data structure to optimize for whatever I'm trying to do.
"Exposing Internals" is not really the big issue here; the big issue is resilience against change. The time when it's appropriate to finely optimize CPU cycles is long after that code has settled into a very durable form. It's just that, for most systems, there's a lot more time spent in the volatile stage than the durable stage. Get your Big-O right and don't chatter over networks and you won't need to worry about performance most of the time. It's much rarer that you don't have to worry about change.