Climate-Change Driven Development

Published 2024-01-17

Modern hardware performs billions of instructions per second. Why the fuck do things get slower as tech seemingly advances?

I’m not talking about:

• Planned obsolescense giving an excuse to write new code that happens to be slower on older devices
• UI/UX advances making everything animated

I’m talking about:

• We use hundreds of dependencies
• We offload things that would otherwise be compile-time to run-time

It’s that second point that gets me the most. In this example, I will describe the state of Cloudflare Workers.

We use an advertised blazing fast router. Epic. wait what… we construct it at run-time? Like holy shit guys, can’t you see this can be compiled into switch statement(s) on string literals which V8 had optimisations for since a very long time? We’re already using a build step for file-based routing.

Sure, people say this is premature optimisation and its a tiny constant cost - but it’s still a cost!! It would be so easy to eliminate!! And only one person needs to write the build tool for everyone else to use without worry!!

But what about dynamic path segments?

- You, probably

It’s still doable. One approach would be to split the path on / (utilising the maxSplit parameter, since we know that at build-time), do switches for the individual segments, skipping the dynamic segments. Another way would be to get the indices of the / and switch on the slices of the constant segments. Pick your poisson. You are doing this at build-time, you have information.

Imagine if we didn’t have to compile a regular expression for every request. We won’t get charged for the CPU time, and we reduce global emissions.

That’s right - reducing global emissions directly correlates to more money in your wallet.

I hope this gives a new meaning to “ship fast”.