Interaction between the design and performance
Does good design help to achieve good performance, or do you have to occasionally compromise best design practices to achieve the best performance? These issues are hotly debated in the programming community. Usually, the design evangelists will argue that if you think that you need to choose between good design and good performance, your design is not good enough. On the other hand, hackers (we're using this term in the classic sense, programmers who hack together solutions, nothing to do with the criminal aspect) often view design guidelines as constraints on the best possible optimization.
The aim of this chapter is to show that both points of view are valid, to a degree. They are also mistaken if viewed as "the whole truth." It would be dishonest to deny that many design practices, when applied to a specific software system, can constrain performance. On the other hand, many guidelines for achieving and maintaining...
