3 ms·

> The decade when Moores law gave freebies to software is probably one of the reasons for this astronomical sluggishness. Application feels slow? Well, just wai

by arkh 9y ago

> The decade when Moores law gave freebies to software is probably one of the reasons for this astronomical sluggishness. Application feels slow? Well, just wait a year and get a new faster CPU. No need to spend resources on optimization. I'd like to see a word 1.0 coded with current tech stacks. Same functionalities. And see how fast it feels. I think this feeling is a combination of a lot of things taken for granted and nostalgia.

fsloth 9y ago
"with current tech stacks" Computers will behave sluggishly, unless care and dedication is paid they don't. I'd start from a 3D engine, a font layout system, and the huge chunk of simple and efficient open source utility libraries that have sprung up. Or slap it on top of QT if that system can be made to behave non-sluggisly. One point is, that you need to be able to access the low levels of the system. To understand it's limitations on your higher level architecture, and on the other hand, figure out what can be made blazing fast under which circumstances and use those as your bearings as you are developing the system. With usability, and understanding of end user being on the front seat. The whole time. The point is, although the system does a great many things, there is no reason from the usability point of view those things are done in serial except legacy and poor design. A system can be made to feel immediate despite what it's doing under the skin. Delay those action, design the system with the user and her time as the first class citizen, rather than some other constraint. Take a modern complex 3D AAA game. One of the root constraints is that it should never lag. Well, they do, obviously, but that is considered a defect more often than not. And... Word... would need some deeper fixing on it's basic premises. As I recall I was pretty easy to break the Word 1.0 layout system in any number of ways.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
I think a Word 1.0 with current tech would be awesome. Unfortunately, few parties seem interested in delivering fast applications anymore, instead focusing on cross-platform availability - you can't release a desktop app anymore without a mobile counterpart. In theory things have gotten a lot faster, doubly so if you consider UI and logic can be distributed over multiple cores, and even moreso considering file access is a factor 10-100 faster than back then, and memory size has increased by over 9000. But it'd be poor on features and nobody would want to use it because of Feature X. I had been looking for a lightweight Slack client alternative, but the only thing I could find looked like shit.

by arkh 9y ago

fsloth 9y ago

"with current tech stacks" Computers will behave sluggishly, unless care and dedication is paid they don't. I'd start from a 3D engine, a font layout system, and the huge chunk of simple and efficient open source utility libraries that have sprung up. Or slap it on top of QT if that system can be made to behave non-sluggisly. One point is, that you need to be able to access the low levels of the system. To understand it's limitations on your higher level architecture, and on the other hand, figure out what can be made blazing fast under which circumstances and use those as your bearings as you are developing the system. With usability, and understanding of end user being on the front seat. The whole time. The point is, although the system does a great many things, there is no reason from the usability point of view those things are done in serial except legacy and poor design. A system can be made to feel immediate despite what it's doing under the skin. Delay those action, design the system with the user and her time as the first class citizen, rather than some other constraint. Take a modern complex 3D AAA game. One of the root constraints is that it should never lag. Well, they do, obviously, but that is considered a defect more often than not. And... Word... would need some deeper fixing on it's basic premises. As I recall I was pretty easy to break the Word 1.0 layout system in any number of ways.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago

I think a Word 1.0 with current tech would be awesome. Unfortunately, few parties seem interested in delivering fast applications anymore, instead focusing on cross-platform availability - you can't release a desktop app anymore without a mobile counterpart. In theory things have gotten a lot faster, doubly so if you consider UI and logic can be distributed over multiple cores, and even moreso considering file access is a factor 10-100 faster than back then, and memory size has increased by over 9000. But it'd be poor on features and nobody would want to use it because of Feature X. I had been looking for a lightweight Slack client alternative, but the only thing I could find looked like shit.