Thief way is actually the best among all of these imo, in terms of readability and efficiency.
They’re setting a variable to a function. Just use the original function. All thief does is obfuscate for literally no gain except character count.
I presumed it to be a standin for just directly using Math.max, since there’s no nice way to show that in a valid code snippet
Not using thief is professional incompetence unless you’re doing something deeply cursed
Sometimes you need to minimize function calls in a tight loop, but otherwise yeah
I was under the impression that modern compilers just inline something like that, and even in older languages (like C) use trickeries are used to inline it (typically MAX is a macro rather than a real function, so its always inlined)
Ultimatelly it depends not just on what you’re doing but also the language and compiler you’re using.
If you’re optimizing that hard you should probably sort the data first anyway, but yeah, sometimes it’s absolutely called for. Not that I’ve actually needed that in my professional career, but then again I’ve never worked close enough to metal for it to actually matter.
That said, all of these are implemented as functions, so they’re already costing the function call anyway…
