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How do I learn to optimize my code better?
(lemmy.ml)
Ask the main part of your question in the title. This should be concise but informative.
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The mental model I have about performance is that the higher abstraction usually beats the lower level abstraction.
So in that sense, a well architected software with proper caching, multithreading where it matters etc. will beat badly architected software (ex: one that brute forces everything). Then, that being equal, good algorithms and solutions beat bad ones. Only then faster runtimes make more of a difference, and at the bottom things like more efficient processor architectures, more efficient compiler etc. beat slower ones.
A good example is Lemmy itself, which as far as I know was made in Rust to be super fast, but then at the beginning was being DDOSed quite easily because of the way the database was designed and lots of queries were very slow. Once they fixed that, Lemmy became actually usable.