From time to time, discussions pop up on how to optimize your code. “Create your arrays like this”, “define your variables like that” etc. Today I read a blog post by Sean Moore, summarizing a lot of (alleged) performance optimizations in AS3. It contains quite a few incorrect points, but probably serves quite good as a place to find out the truth behind some optimization myths. There are a few interesting comments in the “comments section”…
Anywho. My opinion is that you should rarely bother to do this kind of micro optimizations of your code. Maintainability and readability of the code is way more important, especially in larger products as those we’re working on. People should put more effort in that area, than saving a nano second here and there. (Also, there’s often far better places to optimize the code than in variable declarations and arrays…)
I hate it when I come across code like this (JavaScript in this example):
var i = 0, j = 1, k = 2;
… as opposed to the more human readable:
var i = 0; var j = 1; var k = 2;
There’s no real reason what so ever to write code like that! It just makes it harder to read and maintain.
I guess maybe that’s why I’m not a preacher of the chaining madness in jQuery…
(The headline is a quote from Donald Knuth, which I think applies to any programming language, at least all of those I’ve been working with).
