What trade-offs are you typically evaluating with the prototype?

Have you ever found that decision harder to make because of shortcuts etc taken during prototype?

Like everything, “it depends”.

I used to work on a product that handled video, and I would regularly spin up prototypes where I’d stitch together gstreamer pipelines with different plugins to try things out. For reasons that aren’t important, it was easier to use an app linked against the gstreamer libraries than to use its CLI.

There were all sorts of ways I’d evaluate some plugin I was trying out. Maybe I’d look at some test pattern for artifacts. Maybe I’d measure latency. Maybe I’d profile its resource usage. But I can confidently say that in all of those cases, the memory safety of the 100 lines of C++ code that told gstreamer how to plug things together had absolutely no impact on what I was evaluating.

Sometimes the code you’re writing is basically unrelated to what you’re interested in from a prototype.