On 11/16/11 9:31 AM, Don Quixote de la Mancha wrote: > End-user time is even more expensive than programmer time.
Clearly if you are writing an operating system or other performance-critical software it's exceedingly important to optimize things are far as possible. One reason that the iPhone and iPad have fared so well against competition has to be the UI responsiveness, which in no small part derives from the performance engineering the good folks at Apple have put into the OS, Core Animation, etc. One app I maintain has an interactive animated interface that involves on-the-fly shadows, reflections, etc. You can bet that I spent a lot of time addressing threading, graphics processing, etc., so that everything responds smoothly even on an original iPhone. Yes, I rewrote large portions in straight C. But it's all about trade-offs and comparative advantage. I agree that user time is more expensive than developer time. However, "user time" is not always optimized by increasing an app's raw performance. Along the lines of comments I made to April in a different thread, if the user is better served by the developer devoting resources to issues such as interface improvement, new features, smarter application logic, even customer support, that is where resources should be allocated. Or suppose you have an app backed by a subscription web service; time spent *server-side* optimizing bandwidth and storage lowers hosting cost, allowing a lower subscription fee, AND may also pay dividends to the user in speed and battery life of the client device. In other words, in a world of finite resources (a fact with which you clearly agree), for a great majority of developers, dwelling on the performance characteristics of objc_msgSend() is likely not the best way to create the happiest users. -- Conrad Shultz Synthetiq Solutions www.synthetiqsolutions.com _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
