4 ms·

I don’t understand your comment. When would taking 1 seconds to switch tabs ever feel normal? Are you saying all computers should be that slow?

opan 6y ago
Software should be optimized for weaker machines so that it's not this slow even on machines this cheap.
- paulcole 6y ago
  Why bother to support something that 1 in 1,000 people (high estimate) is going to be using?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    The same reason you use accessibility in general: there might be 1 in 1,000 people who might permanently need it, but considerably more who may want it at certain times (running a compile job in the background, on a business trip and only have low internet speeds, underclocking to save battery, …) and that can be the difference between "I want to use your software because it always works for me" and "I tried it and it works 90% of the time for me, so it's not reliable enough for me to pick it". Plus there's the usual feel-good "I'm helping more people using my software, even the (often) lesser-privileged" rather than "I shouldn't care about these people".
    - novok 6y ago
      Those people don't pay you $$$, so in exchange for cheaper / faster eng costs, you pay via lower quality software. In businesses that would actually pay slack money, they will probably pay $800 for a decent enough laptop to run slack every 4 years and employees bring their own smartphones now.
      - cxr 6y ago
        Capitalists also have financial incentives to prioritize against environmental concerns, and yet raising a criticism about a business's practices that neglect to take environmental impact into account isn't out of hand an unreasonable thing to do on the basis that addressing it would mean higher costs to the business. It's a reasonable criticism that reasonable people can have opposing perspectives on and find it worthwhile to talk about, rather than being immediately dismissed. (I also don't see anything in this comment that actually addresses the accessibility metaphor raised by the person you're responding to.)
  - imtringued 6y ago
    If it can run well on bad hardware then it will run even better on good hardware.
    - ClikeX 6y ago
      Unless it's a videogame where framerate and physics are inherently linked. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqDOefJc7a4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqDOefJc7a4
  - squarefoot 6y ago
    It's not just supporting, it's about not wasting resources that can be used productively for other things. Take a look at this paint software: https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter https://tipsonubuntu.com/2020/05/19/azpainter-full-color-illustration-drawing-software-for-linux/ https://tipsonubuntu.com/2020/05/19/azpainter-full-color-ill... It's written in pure C by one developer, and it's super fast. Operations are on par with other software because fx libraries are usually already written in native compiled languages and optimized, but this one loads its interface in a lot less than one second, which becomes like 100 ms or less cached. Wouldn't it be wonderful if all software would at least load their interface comparatively fast? Why do i have to waste (tens? hundreds?) megabytes just to show a GUI that does absolutely nothing else than linking events to graphics elements when someone can write a full fledged software using a quite complex interface whose entire executable size is less than one megabyte?
  - ClikeX 6y ago
    Just to humor you. We develop websites on $3000 Macbooks Pro's. The shitty $300 Windows laptop I see in most households is struggling with a lot of websites. As are $200 Android phones I see many people use on a daily basis. I rarely see any developer testing performance on a crap device or bad connection. The Pinebook might be an outlier device by itself. But ARM Windows laptops are pretty common.
dTal 6y ago
Their point is that software is written so that it's only barely fast enough on machines much more powerful than a PineBook, which makes it more difficult than necessary to use perfectly functional machines that happen to be slower than average. The problem is that fast software is harder to write than slow software (there are trivial transforms from fast to slow, but not vice versa). Thus, each generation back you expect your software to run smoothly on, represents more effort (or at least, more care) on the part of the author. We should expect software to be "just fast enough for the average user" essentially by natural law.

opan 6y ago

Software should be optimized for weaker machines so that it's not this slow even on machines this cheap.

paulcole 6y ago
Why bother to support something that 1 in 1,000 people (high estimate) is going to be using?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  The same reason you use accessibility in general: there might be 1 in 1,000 people who might permanently need it, but considerably more who may want it at certain times (running a compile job in the background, on a business trip and only have low internet speeds, underclocking to save battery, …) and that can be the difference between "I want to use your software because it always works for me" and "I tried it and it works 90% of the time for me, so it's not reliable enough for me to pick it". Plus there's the usual feel-good "I'm helping more people using my software, even the (often) lesser-privileged" rather than "I shouldn't care about these people".
  - novok 6y ago
    Those people don't pay you $$$, so in exchange for cheaper / faster eng costs, you pay via lower quality software. In businesses that would actually pay slack money, they will probably pay $800 for a decent enough laptop to run slack every 4 years and employees bring their own smartphones now.
    - cxr 6y ago
      Capitalists also have financial incentives to prioritize against environmental concerns, and yet raising a criticism about a business's practices that neglect to take environmental impact into account isn't out of hand an unreasonable thing to do on the basis that addressing it would mean higher costs to the business. It's a reasonable criticism that reasonable people can have opposing perspectives on and find it worthwhile to talk about, rather than being immediately dismissed. (I also don't see anything in this comment that actually addresses the accessibility metaphor raised by the person you're responding to.)
- imtringued 6y ago
  If it can run well on bad hardware then it will run even better on good hardware.
  - ClikeX 6y ago
    Unless it's a videogame where framerate and physics are inherently linked. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqDOefJc7a4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqDOefJc7a4
- squarefoot 6y ago
  It's not just supporting, it's about not wasting resources that can be used productively for other things. Take a look at this paint software: https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter https://tipsonubuntu.com/2020/05/19/azpainter-full-color-illustration-drawing-software-for-linux/ https://tipsonubuntu.com/2020/05/19/azpainter-full-color-ill... It's written in pure C by one developer, and it's super fast. Operations are on par with other software because fx libraries are usually already written in native compiled languages and optimized, but this one loads its interface in a lot less than one second, which becomes like 100 ms or less cached. Wouldn't it be wonderful if all software would at least load their interface comparatively fast? Why do i have to waste (tens? hundreds?) megabytes just to show a GUI that does absolutely nothing else than linking events to graphics elements when someone can write a full fledged software using a quite complex interface whose entire executable size is less than one megabyte?
- ClikeX 6y ago
  Just to humor you. We develop websites on $3000 Macbooks Pro's. The shitty $300 Windows laptop I see in most households is struggling with a lot of websites. As are $200 Android phones I see many people use on a daily basis. I rarely see any developer testing performance on a crap device or bad connection. The Pinebook might be an outlier device by itself. But ARM Windows laptops are pretty common.

dTal 6y ago

Their point is that software is written so that it's only barely fast enough on machines much more powerful than a PineBook, which makes it more difficult than necessary to use perfectly functional machines that happen to be slower than average. The problem is that fast software is harder to write than slow software (there are trivial transforms from fast to slow, but not vice versa). Thus, each generation back you expect your software to run smoothly on, represents more effort (or at least, more care) on the part of the author. We should expect software to be "just fast enough for the average user" essentially by natural law.