How Coding Standards Can Impair Application Performance

@Russ, "use fear to drum up business" is not Lori's style, nor indeed is it F5's, though the voice-over is funny ;-)

 

 

As to coding standards, just don't ask her where the curly-braces go in C++, I've finally gotten past that argument (I was tasked with writing the coding standards at an employer before we were married... I still occasionally hear about that one - 'I' made her move hers).

 

 

I used to work on low-end cellphones for major manufacturers, and yes, local scoping - creating another layer of stack-based variables - was an issue for us. We reused a lot of variables in scary ways trying to keep the stack size down. Though the ever-decreasing price of memory has probably reduced this problem even in that space, the performance implications were measurable also - we had a guy who did just that, measured differences like that.

 

 

In the web world though, people should be thinking about this stuff. Particularly the very startups that aren't. Need I point to Twitter? You can save a lot of pain in production by making certain your code performs just as well as it can _before_ two million people are trying to use it.

 

 

Don.