Comment by dunkelheit
10 years ago
Careless piling of layers atop layers is the main reason why everything is slow when computers are crazy fast. Every moderately complex piece of software is so inefficient that it is better not to think about it or else you become paralyzed in horror ;)
Usually something is done to mitigate these inefficiencies only when they become egregious. And that is when even basic knowledge of the inner workings of underlying layers really pays off (see also: mechanical sympathy).
I am currently writing a client to a synchronized application system, and you only really notice how it’s layers upon layers when you write custom functions to serialize/deserialize primitive data types to a raw socket, and then on the next layer already can just abstract and write objects first to a HashMap, and then use the HashMap serializer for sending the actual object. And then you go yet another layer higher and use reflection to automatically sync method calls.
It’s really crazy to think about it.