Efficient Go

Chapter 1. Software Efficiency Matters

The primary task of software engineers is the cost-effective development of maintainable and useful software.

Jon Louis Bentley, Writing Efficient Programs (Prentice Hall, 1982)

Even after 40 years, Jon’s definition of development is fairly accurate. The ultimate goal for any engineer is to create a useful product that can sustain user needs for the product lifetime. Unfortunately, nowadays not every developer realizes the significance of the software cost. The truth can be brutal; stating that the development process can be expensive might be an underestimation. For instance, it took 5 years and 250 engineers for Rockstar to develop the popular Grand Theft Auto 5 video game, which was estimated to cost $137.5 million. On the other hand, to create a usable, commercialized operating system, Apple had to spend way over $500 million before the first release of macOS in 2001.

Because of the high cost of producing software, it’s crucial to focus our efforts on things that matter the most. Ideally, we don’t want to waste engineering time and energy on unnecessary actions, for example, spending weeks on code refactoring that doesn’t objectively reduce code complexity, or deep micro-optimizations of a function that rarely runs. Therefore, the industry continually invents new patterns to pursue an efficient development process. Agile Kanban methods that allow us to adapt to ever-changing requirements, specialized programming languages for mobile platforms ...