What is "overkill"? [closed]

Question

Programmers often wonder if the use of a certain library or programming style is overkill. They also often claim that this is the case (and they are often believed).

What does "overkill" mean in the context of programming?

Answer 1

"overkill" is typically used to mean deploying overly flexible and/or over-engineered solutions to solve what is ostensibly a simple and highly localized problem. The canonical example is FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition.

Answer 2

The term "Overkill" literarilly (if there was ever a literal use of it) refers to the action of killing something or someone, with more resources than necessary. Something like shooting a deer 50 times to make sure it dies.

In programming it applies for the same principle: making use of more resources than necessary or to find an overly complex solution to a simple problem.

Some simple examples are

for i=1 to 100
   x[i]=2^z[i];
   y=x;    
end

Where copying the entire array x in every iteration step achieves the desired result but you could also copy it elementwise y[i]=x[i] saving you some 900 operations and is thus an overkill.

Using the OpenCV library to threshold an image is definetley possible but uses many more resources than strictly necessary and is an exagerated example of an overkill.