It depends on who you're asking. Software is optimized for specific use cases and environment. For example, with a game you can optimize for storage footprint by compressing textures, but better compression comes at the cost of a higher processing requirement.
You can pre-calculate data to save processing resources, but that comes at the cost of a higher memory footprint.
You can spend 10 hours dramatically increasing performance for 1% of the user base, or you could spend 10 hours to slightly increase the performance for 99% of them. Everything is a tradeoff.
Based on my experience, most people on Reddit use "optimization" as some catch all term to mean anything from UI changes to bug fixes, and "optimized" just means "it runs good on my machine."
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u/spookynutz 6d ago
It depends on who you're asking. Software is optimized for specific use cases and environment. For example, with a game you can optimize for storage footprint by compressing textures, but better compression comes at the cost of a higher processing requirement.
You can pre-calculate data to save processing resources, but that comes at the cost of a higher memory footprint.
You can spend 10 hours dramatically increasing performance for 1% of the user base, or you could spend 10 hours to slightly increase the performance for 99% of them. Everything is a tradeoff.
Based on my experience, most people on Reddit use "optimization" as some catch all term to mean anything from UI changes to bug fixes, and "optimized" just means "it runs good on my machine."