Yup. If that 12-cycle speedup is in a hot loop, then yeah, throw a bunch of comments and tests around it and perhaps keep the "clean" version around for illustrative purposes, and then do the fast thing. Perhaps throw in a feature flag to switch between the "clean" and "fast but a little sketchy" versions, and maybe someone will make a method to memoize pure functions generically so the "clean" version can be used with minimal performance overhead.

Clean code should be the default, optimizations should come later as necessary.

[–] coloredgrayscale@programming.dev 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Keeping the clean version around seems dangerous advice.

You know it won't get maintained if there are changes / fixes. So by the time someone may needs to rewrite the part, or application many years later (think migration to different language) it will be more confusing than helping.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 points 6 months ago

Easy solution: write tests to ensure equivalent behavior.