> People are just less willing to spend as much on their machines, Please stop blaming the consumers, they have very little freedom of choice. > as well as pu

> People are just less willing to spend as much on their machines, Please stop blaming the consumers, they have very little freedom of choice. > as well as push much more limited platforms like mobile to their limits. I don't think anyone has really pushed any recent smartphone to their limits. I haven't checked if any demoparty maybe had a smartphone compo, but if they didn't, then yeah nobody has really tried. The C64, Amiga and early x86 PCs have been pushed to their limits though, squeezing out every drop of performance. And there still exist C64 scene weirdos that work to make these machines perform the unimaginable. Smartphones haven't been around long enough and have been continuously replaced by slightly better versions, that really nobody has had time to really find out what those machines are capable of. > but not having to deal with the optimizations they dealt with 40 years ago doesn't make me unhappy. I used to have to deal with such optimizations and I totally get that. It's freeing and I occasionally have to remind myself what it means that I don't have to worry about using a megabyte more memory because machines have gigabytes. Except that a megabyte is pretty huge if you know how to use it. But not having to deal with the optimizations also means that new developers never learn these optimizations and they will be forgotten. And that's bad. Because there's still a place for these optimizations, like 95% of the code doesn't matter, but for that 5% performance critical stuff, ... if you just learned the framework, then you're stuck and your apps gonna suck. It's kinda weird to optimize code nowadays though. At least if you're writing JS. It's not like optimizing C or machine code at all. If you're not measuring performance, 99% sure you'll waste time optimizing the wrong thing. Sometimes it feels like I'm blindly trying variations on my inner loop because sometimes there is little rhyme or reason to what performs better (through the JIT). Tip for anyone in this situation: disable the anti-fingerprinting setting in your browser, which fuzzes the timing functions. It makes a huge difference for the accuracy and repeatability of your performance measurements. Install Chromium and only use it for that, if you worry about the security.