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Comment by shurcooL | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes "efficient" and "easy to understand and be sure is correct" don't have to be mutually exclusive; see this example [1] of Java and Go.

Note that the code is autogenerated, so it should be equally efficient. The Go version also happens to be very simple and no different than most humans would write by hand (without trying very hard to optimize).

[1] https://gist.github.com/shurcooL/9f94bbd021b4693cf584

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The code samples in your gist aren't doing the same thing. The Java version decodes the UTF-8 stored in the protobuf into Java's native UTF-16 Strings on first access, while Go strings are native UTF-8 and so only a nil check is necessary.

Or are you saying that languages should always use UTF-8 natively? I would agree with you on that, but disagree that this proves your point that "efficient" and "easy to understand and verify correctness" aren't mutually exclusive. pb.getSomeId().charAt(1000) runs in constant time in Java (albeit failing to give correct data if getSomeId() contains codepoints higher than \uFFFF), but pb.GetSomeId()[1000] will give you garbage data in Go if your field contains non-ASCII text. To get a valid codepoint in Go, you'd need to do string([]rune(pb.GetSomeId())[1000]), which runs in linear time and omits the check for valid UTF-8 bytes.

That's a good point, it seems the Java code is checking if the entire string is valid UTF-8 while the Go version isn't. I wonder why the behavior of generated protobufs is different between the two.

I'm not disputing that efficient code can be easier to understand in some instances, just that the assertion that efficient code is easier to understand. Logically, disputing that just requires a single instance of efficient code that is hard to understand. I think that's a trivial enough example to be self evident. In reality, I'm just wondering what they were trying to convey with that statement. I doubt they would have written it without reason, so I'm curious to the reason.

Fair point.

It's possible when they said "efficient", they did not mean "hardware efficient, runs fast, doesn't use a lot of resources" but "developer efficient, faster to write and easier to understand". But that entire phrase as is doesn't make sense, I agree with that.

It's also possible to be a simple mistake. Maybe they went overboard with marketing phrases and claimed something that isn't quite true.

We never said that. The closest I can think of is that simple code (short stack, no DI, layering, etc.) is simpler AND faster at the same time, and in my talk I give specific examples.

To me, that sounds like you are saying simple code is often efficient (or that efficient code can by simple), not that efficient code is simpler (which is how I interpret the original text).

To be very clear, I don't doubt the author (you?) had a good point to make, just that it was unclear what that was from the way it was presented, and to such a degree that it took me out of the flow of reading the post, and perhaps a less ambiguous way of expressing that concept (or omitting it, if it's expressed succinctly elsewhere) would be clearer and more effective.

Sorry, I'm not the author, I'm the guy at Stack Overflow that's being cited by the article (Marco C.).

All, true, which is why I outlined my assumptions and left it open for others to help try to figure out. :)

Unfortunately, if it is just poor communication on their part, we'll likely get no answers that can be considered more likely than others without original author or someone related (work-wise) piping up.

The generated Java code is just bad. You can simplify it by adding imports and removing the redundant variable: https://gist.github.com/electrum/d2f7668f2a7eb95420a9

Of course, as others have mentioned, it is validating the UTF-8 but the Go version is not.

It's not clear to me what argument the example is supporting.

The Go code is very concise and the Java code is very verbose.

The Go code does look more efficient but what is ImpressionData? Where is it checking the string is valid utf8?

Why would you send a string which is not valid utf8 over the wire in your system? That's the kind of validation that should probably be done prior to that. Or if it hasn't, you can do the validation manually on the receiver. There's no reason to incur the cost on each transmission.

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