30 ms·

I can’t help thinking we should have headed down this path a long time ago. It’s harder to go backwards.

• jchb 9y ago
  If we are talking about just-in-time, managed vs ahead-of-time, compiled-to-native, parts of the industry have already been changing course in last 5 years - even if not always with full commitment, but more of a "just in case". Java and .NET platforms has been gaining ahead-of-time compilation support from the main vendors. Microsoft has been reviving C++ support. Various new programming languages with static-typing and high performance as a priority are gaining traction.
  • setquk 9y ago
    It's not so much the underlying technology but what we have built upon it.
  • pjmlp 9y ago
    On Microsoft's case it is even more radical, UWP is basically the initial design for .NET, based on COM as ABI instead of a managed one, hence .NET Native and C++ as main languages. I really like this change of course.
• phaedrus 9y ago
  Recently I've been working with some legacy Win32 C/C++ code and had the thought, why don't I take all of these hard-coded #defines and Win32 message numbers, window-class names, etc. and put these magic numbers in an Sqlite database instead? Of course I'd be loading a lot of data from disk into RAM that would have simply been encoded as immediate values in the executable before. But my rough estimate still puts this at (at least) an order of magnitude less RAM than abstraction layers like WPF use. And that's when I realized: we jumped from severely resource constrained designed straight to completely wasteful designs without adequately exploring the design space in between. To paraphrase Richard Feynman's quote, "There's plenty of room at the bottom": "There's plenty of room in the middle."