"My mining algorithm, which uses a lot more CPU and memory, is more performant." The key being that performant is often associated w/ speed (i.e. higher performing) whereas efficient ambiguously can refer to many things you have improved on.
Yep, that's how I understand the word “performant” as well. A car that accelerates from 0-100 kph in under 3 seconds would be ”performant”. A car is “efficient” if it burns less than 4 liters of gasoline per 100 kilometers.
The algorithm doesn't perform more efficiently or accurately, though - it's less efficient (it uses more resources) and it should be the same accuracy (or we're comparing apples with oranges).
haha yah i know, it would perform terrible. imagine running a big dns server at ISP level, and having to perform 9 million tls handshakes a second. have fun with that lol. this was just an example of how to avoid the 'performant' word.