I can tell you that when I navigate around the web doing nothing more than having some web apps open, the UI for the whole OS will start stuttering and the fans will kick into action. `top` says this is all chrome.

I buy that the problem is “feature bloat,” but I also think a great deal of these features are possible with a heck of a lot less code and a heck of a lot less pointless GC etc.

.filter().map() may not itself be alarming for a few hundred elements…but it is for a few hundred elements multiplied by a few hundred features. If you still want those few hundred features, maybe it would be nice if some thought had gone into making them individually perform better.

Tangent: I love the Unix philosophy! Do one thing well. Nothing more satisfying than being able to pipe inputs to outputs and put together little programs out of modular components. But when you want to build a program, you don’t do that, because you care about the “well” part of “do one thing well.”

Context does matter for a lot of this, and I think there’s probably a lot of grey area here. Doing something high level? Whatever, just get the job done, focus on readability, don’t worry about the weird performance edges of it. It’s just that those chunks have a tendency to become bigger chunks and get included where they were never intended, or where their underlying implementation is accidentally replicated multiple times for slightly different outputs (in the abstract, like doing .map().map().map()).

Anyway I can tell I’m losing the thread and ranting mindlessly now…