202204272219 The fastest code is no code

It’s impossible for any line of code, no matter how fast and well written to be as performant as no line of code. There are two points here.

From a performance perspective, we obviously only want to do the work that’s absolutely essential. We want to optimize the source code and execution paths to be as minimal as possible.

From a philosophical perspective, we want our code to be simple and minimal, although there’s more leniency in this point than the performance one. Less code written is less code we have to read and less we have to understand: minimizing the amount of code minimizes what we have to reason about and maintain. Importantly though, we also want to make that code maximally understandable. We want to follow 202203221620 The golden rule of programming and value simplicity and understanding over minimizing code.