The Go Programming Language

11.5 Profiling

Benchmarks are useful for measuring the performance of specific operations, but when we’re trying to make a slow program faster, we often have no idea where to begin. Every programmer knows Donald Knuth’s aphorism about premature optimization, which appeared in “Structured Programming with go to Statements” in 1974. Although often misinterpreted to mean performance doesn’t matter, in its original context we can discern a different meaning:

There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance ...