5 ms·

Modern machines are stupid fast. Something like 200,000,000,000 cpu instructions per second. And we're already there. Single core CPU speed has been stagnating

Modern machines are stupid fast. Something like 200,000,000,000 cpu instructions per second. And we're already there. Single core CPU speed has been stagnating for years. We used to get ~1.5x performance boost every 2 years. Today's CPU's are only twice as fast as designs from a decade ago. Everything is going parallel, which buys us some time. But long term, I think the biggest factor will be "slow" programming languages going extinct. When you can't depend on CPU performance constantly increasing, companies will look elsewhere. The 10-50x speed difference in programming languages will become a target. IMO you can already see this happening to Ruby, and Rust. Increasing attention to making low level languages more palatable. And decline of slow languages that don't have other advantages. And I think this is just the beginning with all the focus on energy efficiency. I dare say performance might even become government regulated, like efficiency is for home appliances

eru 6y ago
> I dare say performance might even become government regulated, like efficiency is for home appliances Sounds like a nightmare. But since programming has so far restricted attempts at credentialism-gatekeeping and even unionising, I'm not holding my breath. > IMO you can already see this happening to Ruby, and Rust. Increasing attention to making low level languages more palatable. Or viewed in reverse, attempts to make higher level languages faster. One way to do that is to make sure that the levels of abstraction that exists in the language don't leave much of a trace at runtime. Ie compile the abstractions away. That's more straightforward with more statically typed languages. But the excellent work done on JavaScript engines shows that given enough resources to throw at the problem, being 'slow' or 'fast' is not a property of languages but of implementations. (But the language definitely has an influence on how much implementation effort you need.)
tester34 6y ago
> I think the biggest factor will be "slow" programming languages going extinct. then make this language faster, problem solved :)
johnisgood 6y ago
Are we going to get back to Forth?!
zamadatix 6y ago
Things aren't increasing as fast as they were in the 90s but I'd be willing to bet at least the last 5 years of single thread stagnation was largely a fluke due to lack of competition in high end CPUs coupled with various setbacks in Intel's next generation processes preventing the (at the time) best from gaining advantage from significant manufacturing advances. I think releases like Zen 3 and Apple's M1 give a good sign the next doubling period for single thread performance may be the first that was significantly shorter than the previous.

eru 6y ago

> I dare say performance might even become government regulated, like efficiency is for home appliances Sounds like a nightmare. But since programming has so far restricted attempts at credentialism-gatekeeping and even unionising, I'm not holding my breath. > IMO you can already see this happening to Ruby, and Rust. Increasing attention to making low level languages more palatable. Or viewed in reverse, attempts to make higher level languages faster. One way to do that is to make sure that the levels of abstraction that exists in the language don't leave much of a trace at runtime. Ie compile the abstractions away. That's more straightforward with more statically typed languages. But the excellent work done on JavaScript engines shows that given enough resources to throw at the problem, being 'slow' or 'fast' is not a property of languages but of implementations. (But the language definitely has an influence on how much implementation effort you need.)

tester34 6y ago

> I think the biggest factor will be "slow" programming languages going extinct. then make this language faster, problem solved :)

johnisgood 6y ago

Are we going to get back to Forth?!

zamadatix 6y ago

Things aren't increasing as fast as they were in the 90s but I'd be willing to bet at least the last 5 years of single thread stagnation was largely a fluke due to lack of competition in high end CPUs coupled with various setbacks in Intel's next generation processes preventing the (at the time) best from gaining advantage from significant manufacturing advances. I think releases like Zen 3 and Apple's M1 give a good sign the next doubling period for single thread performance may be the first that was significantly shorter than the previous.