I don't personally use the word since there are many alternatives, but its use is now definitely widespread and consistently understood. There's really no argument against the fact that it has entered the English lexicon.
CW: ...and this way it'll be more performant too.
Me: Performant? As in faster?
CW: Yes.
Me (to self): Then why didn't you just say it'll be faster?
IMHO it obfuscates meaning and should be avoided; the surrounding discussion/vagueness about what it means (I don't think it means efficient, but only faster --- as in, a high-performance car) shows that too.
"Acceptable or adequate"
When schoolteacher Edna Krabappel hears the Springfield town motto "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man," she comments she'd never heard of the word embiggens before moving to Springfield. Miss Hoover replies, "I don't know why; it's a perfectly cromulent word".
To my mind, the difference is that “performant” delivers results quickly, whereas “efficient” uses little energy. A performant solution might be efficient, but not necessarily, and vice versa. Does anyone else share this understanding or am I living in a linguistic bubble?
Not sure about Swedish (Daniel is Swedish), but in Finnish, we have the word “suorituskykyinen”, meaning “efficient” or “able to perform”. I can see how Finnish writers might want to use “performant” to replace this commonly used word. Perhaps there's a similar history for Swedish speakers? I sure have seen “performant” a lot in academic texts written by Finnish and Swedish speakers in the last 20 years.
webster says:
"performant"
The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary. Click on a spelling suggestion below or try again using the search bar above.
preformant performance performing performances performable preformants perforate conformant perform formant performed informant performer perforata performers performs preformat efficiency = performance / resources
Performant emphasises the numerator much more.
nitpick aside, agreed
Efficiency is relative to the amount of resources required to achieve a similar result. To use the car example above, a car that can do 100km/h at 4L/100km is more efficient than another can than do 100km/h at 8L/100km.
The point of absolute efficiency is referred to as optimum. Essentially, top performance possible with the minimum of resources possible.
It suffers in that doesn't sound very technical.
That's right - the CPU is faster at completing the job, though the GPU executes instructions more quickly.