[arch-general] replacement for clyde

Cédric Girard girard.cedric at gmail.com
Fri Aug 19 12:06:53 EDT 2011


On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 5:43 PM, Thomas Dziedzic <gostrc at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> I agree that your arguments have a valid point of view all the way up
> to this point where you lost me.
> For me, "lack of quality" is in the same category as "lack of quality
> impacts speed"
> For example, lets have the same badly written algorithm compiled with
> no optimization and the other being compiled with -O999 ZOMG!!
> It doesn't matter to me if one ruins your system faster, it will still
> do the same thing.
> This is why I think the "lack of quality impacts speed" issue being
> completely different from "lack of quality" is invalid.


I will try to explain my point with an example. Take a bash script which
needs to find some string into a file.
Let's do this the ugly way:
echo $(cat $file) | grep -q "%PROVIDES%.*$1"
Let's do this the correct way:
grep -q "%PROVIDES%.*$1" $file

If both take the same resources to execute, you may say: OK, the first one
is ugly but I don't really care because both give the same result and there
is no performance impact.
Now, if the first one appears to be way slower than the second one, the
situation is different because not only it impacts the developer (complex
code hard to understand and maintains) but it also impacts the end user
(have to wait longer than needed).

This example was one real example taken from yaourt at the state it was in
January 2010. There is nothing ugly in the way it will not work or break
your system. It was just ugly and slow code.

-- 
Cédric Girard


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