3 ms·

It's just incredible how complex and advanced the hardware got, but at the same time, how crappy and inefficient the software on top of it is. I know it's simpl

It's just incredible how complex and advanced the hardware got, but at the same time, how crappy and inefficient the software on top of it is. I know it's simple economics and the chip foundry has an economy of scale that the Electron developer lacks. But it still feels like we're all eating garbage out of golden plates. By the end of the next decade we will probably reach the end of what is physically possible in device fabrication, so competition will have to move to design and software efficiency.

brian-armstrong 8y ago
I thought at first you were going to talk about how EDA software sucks. Now /that's/ garbage
- bumholio 8y ago
  It's a good example of the same underlying economic incentives. An EDA title is used by a few tens of thousands of professionals, at best. Large investments into making it more user-friendly and stable is not really worth it in the grand scheme of things. It needs to be just the minimal viable product that can get the chip out the door; it will be complex and feature packed rather than usable, and the engineers will learn to navigate around it's idiosyncrasies and bugs just like they solve other technical problems, it's what engineers do. The chip itself though, that's a whole nother thing. Especially the process that works across multiple designs and becomes an asset for the company. Any nanosecond shaved here improves the capacity of the foundry to compete and helps a billion people complete the task 1% faster or have 1% more memory. The customers have no reason to work around a less performing product, they will just buy from the competition. So you get this strange combo of supernatural hardware assembled with atomic precision by garbage software written in Perl by an outsourcing guy with 6 months total programming experience.
  - vgy7ujm 8y ago
    What does Perl has to do with this? Wouldn’t be any better if the same guy wrote it in crap Python now would it?
    - sanxiyn 8y ago
      By the way, the lingua franca of EDA is Tcl.
bigcostooge 8y ago
Improvements in efficiency may only be needed in build and runtime systems. You may still be able to write electron apps.
- ants_a 8y ago
  That presumes the existence of a Sufficiently Smart Compiler.

brian-armstrong 8y ago

I thought at first you were going to talk about how EDA software sucks. Now /that's/ garbage

bumholio 8y ago
It's a good example of the same underlying economic incentives. An EDA title is used by a few tens of thousands of professionals, at best. Large investments into making it more user-friendly and stable is not really worth it in the grand scheme of things. It needs to be just the minimal viable product that can get the chip out the door; it will be complex and feature packed rather than usable, and the engineers will learn to navigate around it's idiosyncrasies and bugs just like they solve other technical problems, it's what engineers do. The chip itself though, that's a whole nother thing. Especially the process that works across multiple designs and becomes an asset for the company. Any nanosecond shaved here improves the capacity of the foundry to compete and helps a billion people complete the task 1% faster or have 1% more memory. The customers have no reason to work around a less performing product, they will just buy from the competition. So you get this strange combo of supernatural hardware assembled with atomic precision by garbage software written in Perl by an outsourcing guy with 6 months total programming experience.
- vgy7ujm 8y ago
  What does Perl has to do with this? Wouldn’t be any better if the same guy wrote it in crap Python now would it?
  - sanxiyn 8y ago
    By the way, the lingua franca of EDA is Tcl.

bigcostooge 8y ago

Improvements in efficiency may only be needed in build and runtime systems. You may still be able to write electron apps.

ants_a 8y ago
That presumes the existence of a Sufficiently Smart Compiler.