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The likelihood that people who created Electron don't understand caches or cache locality is close to zero. That's an oversimplification. Electron is a large pr
by _____s 6y ago
The likelihood that people who created Electron don't understand caches or cache locality is close to zero. That's an oversimplification. Electron is a large project that does many things… there are many reasons why it could have been slow. Today there are many Electron based apps that are quite decent.
> Knowing how to maximally exploit a CPU is way more important than knowing eight different Javascript frameworks if good software is your objective. And frankly, learning Node is way easier than figuring out how to structure basic, bare-bones Javascript so that it leverages your L1 cache.
Learning Node isn't easier than learning how to structure basic, bare-bones code that leverages L1 cache. In fact, it's quite the opposite. You can learn cache locality as a concept in much less time than you would learn Node (or any programming ecosystem for that matter).
- bananaface 6y agoI don't buy it. Unreal Engine is a larger project that does many more things, and the speed at which it does them compared to Electron is not even in the same universe.
- aprdm 6y agoHow can you compare unreal engine with electron ?! That makes no sense at all.
- bananaface 6y agoThe fact that people think they're somehow fundamentally incomparable is the problem.
- aprdm 6y agoSoftware is all about trade offs. I would actually recommend you the book Software Engineer at Google since you mentioned them so many times: https://www.amazon.ca/Software-Engineering-Google-Lessons-Programming/dp/1492082791 https://www.amazon.ca/Software-Engineering-Google-Lessons-Pr... The first chapter is all about that and how software engineer isn't programming. You seem to think as programming and I believe you're missing the bigger picture.
- bananaface 6y agoI understand what you're getting at but I think you're seriously underestimating the implications of what I said.
- pantaloony 6y agoSeriously. This whole part of the comment tree has been fabulously enlightening. Great insight into the psychology of how we end up with chat clients that do less with 20x the resources than entire operating system + office suites of yesteryear.
- aprdm 6y agoI feel you tried to be snarky and I didn't really follow even what you tried to imply! Regardless would like to have your opinion if you don't mind explaining it better.
- pantaloony 6y agoI’d figured it was mostly cheap companies driving the broadly terrible performance of modern software for often fairly small benefits to speed and dev cost, but it turns out there’s a much stronger contingent of software developers with not just a tolerance for business-driven trade-offs, but a strongly enabling attitude toward the whole thing, apparently not seeing what they’re doing the same way I do at all. Adding this information, observed software quality makes a lot more sense to me now.
- aprdm 6y agoSoftware developers are hired by business to solve business problems. Optimization of speed is sometimes it, sometimes it isn't. I have worked accelerating algorithms in VHDL with a PCI-e interface, embedded linux without a MMU because a MMU uses too many logical gates, digital signal processing systems (FFT, goertzel, sigma delta filters) that had to process a lot of data under uS and etc. Now a days I work more in the devops space, full stack dev and whatnot. I have worked with a lot of technologies, different constraints, different teams, different companies (12 in total) in different industries. Trying to paint all business and developers as bad or as cheap because business requirements do not align with your view isn't really fair.
- pantaloony 6y ago