RFR: Things to consider before PR

[Stuart Marks]

On Fri, 21 Apr 2023 16:15:30 GMT, Jesper Wilhelmsson <jwilhelm at openjdk.org> wrote:

> Text about what kind of changes that may or may not be desired in OpenJDK. Based on @prrace's text on https://openjdk.org/groups/client-libs/

Tradeoffs around performance-related proposals. We all want the JDK to be faster right? There are a bunch of tradeoffs around proposals that attempt to improve the performance of the system. One is that a change might speed up an infrequently occurring case but slow down a frequently occurring case. That's usually the wrong tradeoff.

Another tradeoff is between code complexity and performance. Code needs to be maintained in perpetuity (see item on maintainability) so adding to code complexity for a modest or negligible performance improvement is often a bad trade.

Finally, it's when considering performance proposals, they often need to be backed up by benchmarks. It's important that one understand benchmark results properly. In particular, one needs to pay attention to the error ranges and memory allocation results.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/guide/pull/101#issuecomment-1520691515