Re: Software Architecture/Design

On 11 June 2010 13:46, Jon Frisby <[email protected]> wrote:

> On top of that, much of the work of optimizing things for performance makes
> functionality 'brittle' / 'rigid' -- hard to change in arbitrary ways.  It
> removes the ability to incrementally explore and refine ideas, or at least
> boxes that process in considerably.
>

Isn't that the point of this entire thread (or am I getting my threads mixed
up)? Optimising code that is put together in a way that only considers ease
of implementation can be incredibly difficult to optimise and may require
nasty hacks which can make the codebase brittle. If you could just design
your system upfront with some consideration of the underlying HW you'll get
better performance - note that this is not necessarily exclusive of any of
the features that you want in your code base like extensibility, or
readability.

Component based systems could be such a solution. Sure its a different way
of thinking about your problems, its not necessarily OO, but if done right
it could give flexibility, extensibility, maintainability and lots of other
'ilities that we want in our code base. Plus performance. And performance,
at least for games, is critical. As is functionality - we need both of
these, not one or the other.




>
> THAT is why performance takes a back-seat to functionality, and why an
> attitude like yours is absolutely terrifying to anyone who's ever put their
> own money on the line to ship a product.
>
> -JF
>
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