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New shiny libraries, frameworks, and platforms draw in developers. Those new things are typically not well polished or optimized. By the time they get optimized

New shiny libraries, frameworks, and platforms draw in developers. Those new things are typically not well polished or optimized. By the time they get optimized, developers move on to newer and shinier things. Java, PHP, .NET, and Javascript were all slow until they got fast (although with Javascript, things got really complicated and slow again). I say this as a developer that uses all those now-fast things and avoids the shiny and new for these reasons (and more, including lack of tooling).

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
But you'd think those new things would be built on top of the older, faster, 'core' libraries, and the abstraction only improves developer ergonomics while the result is just as fast if not faster. I mean compilers should empower that, allowing for good, readable code that compiles to blazing fast code. That's the theory anyway, but I know in practice it's different. I keep thinking of my time working on iOS software, where I experienced the transition from objective-C to ARC to Swift; it still felt like the end result was the same, if not even better (Swift whole-module optimization), but the developer ergonomics were much improved. Still kinda miss xcode, a shame it's not really usable for anything that isn't obj-C/Swift.