Sometimes you run into a situation where you have to extend/improve some existin

Question

Sometimes you run into a situation where you have to extend/improve some existing code. You see that the old code is very lean, but it's also difficult to extend, and takes time to read.

Is it a good idea to replace it with modern code?

Some time ago I liked the lean approach, but now, it seems to me that it's better to sacrifice a lot of optimizations in favor of higher abstractions, better interfaces and more readable, extendable code.

The compilers seem to be getting better as well, so things like struct abc = {} are silently turned into memsets, shared_ptrs are pretty much producing the same code as raw pointer twiddling, templates are working super good because they produce super lean code, and so on.

But still, sometimes you see stack based arrays and old C functions with some obscure logic, and usually they are not on the critical path.

Is it a good idea to change such code if you have to touch a small piece of it either way?

Explanation / Answer

Where?

On a home page of a Google-scale website, it is not acceptable. Keep the things as quick as possible.

In a part of an application which is used by one person once a year, it is perfectly acceptable to sacrifice performance in order to gain code readability.

In general, what are the non-functional requirements for the part of the code you're working on? If an action must perform under 900 ms. in a given context (machine, load, etc.) 80% of the time, and actually, it performs under 200 ms. 100% of the time, sure, make the code more readable even if it might slightly impact the performance. If on the other hand the same action never performed under ten seconds, well, you should rather try to see what's wrong with the performance (or the requirement in the first place).

Also, how readability improvement will decrease the performance? Often, developers are adapting the behavior close to premature optimization: they are afraid to increase the readability, believing that it will drastically destroy the performance, while the more readable code will spend a few microseconds more doing the same action.

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