Comment by dalke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalke | Hacker News Reader

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Performant is a perfectly valid word which has been part of software engineering since at least the 1990s.

"... aiming to provide performant tools ..." (1995) - https://books.google.com/books?id=uZjYdk4bQgkC&pg=PA1&dq=per...

definitions for different aspects of 'peformant' (1998) - https://books.google.se/books?id=FYkmwYKBoCwC&pg=PA235&dq=%2...

"The network and hierarchical data models, introduced in the 1960's, provide a very performant data organization for well-defined, update-intensive transaction processing of large volumes of data at the cost of conceptual complexity" (1993) - https://books.google.com/books?id=Ro3zjjTNE9UC&pg=PA327&dq=p...

Here's the n-grams trend. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=performant&yea... .

There are many domain-specific terms which have not yet made it to general dictionaries. For example, from your comments, I see you used the word 'multicast', This is not in Merriam-Webster, at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suggestions/multic... . What makes it a word but not performant? Is "zero-copy" a word? "smarthost"? "type-punning"? "upstream"?

Those example words have precise meaning, "performant" does not. Engineers should communicate using precise language, like other technical disciplines.

I think that's what bugs me about "performant" --- it feels like vague buzzwordy management-speak, because there's already a well-understood word for the same concept: "fast". Ditto for "lightweight"; "small" gets the point across clearly, and if it's both fast and small, it's "efficient".

Software can be big or small, fast or slow, efficient or inefficient (for combinations of size and speed.) I don't think we need any more adjectives beyond those.

Instead of "significantly less performant", you could just say "much slower". (Note that LOOP was much slower on older Intel CPUs, but was the same as the longer sequence on AMD's. It would not surprise me if newer Intel ones now decode LOOP into the same sequence of uops. In any case, unless the loop is a tiny one, what happens in the body is likely to make a much more significant difference, especially if cache misses are involved.)

Some interesting reading on why LOOP was slower on Intel CPUs --- because Windows 95's timing loop used it (observe the lack of "performant" in any of those posts): https://groups.google.com/d/topic/alt.windows98/liuMAIctHRg

But do you think it's not a word?

Also, I think performant is often used as a synonym for "fast enough", which is slightly different than "fast."

What's imprecise about: "Performant: 1) meeting the objective, often applied to a performance objective, 2) productive"?

In looking around just now, economics seems to prefer the second definition, which is why I added it. All of the uses I found are compatible with this definition.

What's the definition of "object oriented" again?

A vague word is useful when you are trying to convey a vague concept, in much the same way as it would be hard to convey the idea that you know that some metric is between 20% and 40%, if you are not allowed to be vague and are required to arbitrarily pick some number like 38.51% and say that one instead

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