Performance vs. Correctness

This would seem to be a truism, but it bears repeating. Bertrand Meyer once said "Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little." A lot of people seem to forget that if you get the wrong answer very quickly, it's still the wrong answer. And, a lot of those people are in the OSS and Perl communities. A corollary to that could be "Try and do it right. If you can't guarantee the right answer, then fail very quickly and and even louder."

Why bring this up now? Well, in Perl, performance concerns seem to crop up every so often, and in places where it makes no sense to bring them up. For example, when dealing with crazy date manipulations. DateTime is the de-facto standard for date manipulations in Perl, and for good reason. It is correct and, in most cases, fast. But, its interface is very low level. There is another module that provides different interfaces to dates - Date::Manip. But, even the author acknowledges in the POD that "It's the most powerful of the date modules. It's also the biggest and slowest." And, whenever it's brought up, inevitably someone will say "Yeah, it's pretty heavy."

My answer to that is "So what?" The very first criterion for a computer program is "Does it work?" And, by that I mean "Is it correct?" Once it's correct (and you have a regression suite to validate that), then you measure its performance. If its overall performance is acceptable, then you leave it alone.

Let me repeat - if overall performance is acceptable, then you leave it alone.

If overall performance needs improved, then you profile it. Chances are, the module you think is heavy isn't your bottleneck. Even if it is, it's very likely that a small change to one method will net you 80% (or more!) of your potential speed improvements.

Pick modules based on features. Then, if you need it, optimize after profiling. And, module authors, don't refuse to fix a bug because it would hurt performance. If your module is wrong, then it needs to be fixed.