- Casual google search shows people have been talking about whether it's a word since the early 00's at least
- Seems like it's coming from coding land
- Ngrams indicates it existed to some degree for a while but has been experiencing precipitous growth since about 2010
- Taking a peak at the google books hits from the 90's, looks like there's also some specialized usage within theater theory; I doubt this is related to the software usage or the now generalized use to mean "high performing"
- Also in the 80's and 90s some math-y and logic-y academic works that one might suppose are much more likely to be related to comp sci / programming uses. However! some of these are as nouns with what looks like a quite distinct meaning.
- Feels like in a lot of these academic usages across the board, "performant" is being used more to indicate something that is related to performance rather than something that is performing in a specific way
- It's also a word in French, and from casually eyeballing those 80's-90's google books hits, some of the earlier cases that seem to match the usage we're seeing now do seem to be coming from French authors writing in English (like here) and/or translations of French works.
- Edit: Similar results definitely findable in the 70's also, such as this. Lot of Nuclear "performant" stuff in the 70s for some reason.
- Pushing back into the 1960s, very few relevant results in English, but see this French one.
- The farther back you go the more results are actually the word "performance" but the scan is cut off by a line after the "n", lol.
By the way, some great conference names here, like
- "European Control Conference."
- "International Symposium on Banana in the Subtropics"
- "Conference on Automated Deduction"
