Linux

to some extents - sunk cause fallacy and performance.

I had a launcher script which required it's run to complete under 50 ms to be usable. python just did not make the cut (it would call external stuff and more). I know i should not expect performancce from shell scripts, but started from essentially a find of about 20-30 files and a cat of at most 100 lines. It was fast enough then. then I kept adding stuff, it kept slowing down. I thought of converting to python, even did some initial bits, performance was not good.

beyond a certain point, i kinda stopped caring optimising (i replaced bash with dash, made mos tif not all calls to external tools a minimum, and tried to minimise slow calls(think calling some tool again and again vs a vectorised operation, or not reading a variable multiple times in memory )). At some point it reached 300-400ms, and i decided to split it into 2 things - a executor part which cahes output of some commands with certain run conditions, and a launcher part which just read the output file (now almost a 1 miB).

At some point i decided learning rust, and first thing i wrote was that launcher. implemented caching and run conditions better, moved larger files (now it read multiple megabytes(15+)) to /tmp dir, which is mounted in memory, and tried to minimise variable calls. now it lists 10 times more files, in less than a third or fifth of the time.

tl;dr - a stupid person did not shift to a compiled program for a long time and kept optimising a shell script