How many programmers write a YAML/JSON parser vs. use an existing library?
How many of the ones who write their own parser would benefit from using a library more than from reading assembly?
If your answer is that: "well, the ones writing the library benefit from learning assembly"... Think about what percentage of programmers they represent. Not to mention that source-level profiling will still give them better bang for their buck.
As somebody who has read a ton of assembly in their career because those marginal gains mattered: 99% of programmers are better off investing their time elsewhere.
Yes i agree with that one most people don't need, they should first use a profiler. Then they can easily improve the performance by 10x.
For example I optimized a calculation with python dataframes by monkeypatching the 'unique' method so it would skip the sort, since my data was already sorted. This gained me a 5% performance improvement. (there where a few other tricks which reduced the calculation time from 3h to 20m making iterating faster)
So i guess the assembly part is just a personal interest and it is only useful for the most inner loop of a program which you can't avoid.
It seems that in general using SIMDs/intrinsic is already in the very advanced playbook of a developer. Just like reflection, classpath scanning etc, GPU acceleration.
Ideally the standard library should provide the fastest JSON/YAML/CSV parser so no other attempts are made to improve on the standard.
I suspect your argument could even be used if you need performance it might be easier to just switch languages. Somebody was super exiting to me that he used a javascript lib which generated optimized code for SQL queries deserialization at runtime. I bluntly said well shouldn't you just use another language to avoid this complexity.
Curious question, Why did you read assembly often in your career?
How many of the ones who write their own parser would benefit from using a library more than from reading assembly?
If your answer is that: "well, the ones writing the library benefit from learning assembly"... Think about what percentage of programmers they represent. Not to mention that source-level profiling will still give them better bang for their buck.
As somebody who has read a ton of assembly in their career because those marginal gains mattered: 99% of programmers are better off investing their time elsewhere.