7 ms·
When I saw this mentioned on HN I immediately knew this kind of comment would be there because something along the lines and I am paraphrasing "its probably fas
by Hnus 5y ago
When I saw this mentioned on HN I immediately knew this kind of comment would be there because something along the lines and I am paraphrasing "its probably fast because its not enterprise enough" was repeated in every place the refterm was shared by different people even multiple times even after showing all the proof in the world that its in fact the opposite they almost refused to believe that software can be that much better than its standard today even to the point of bringing up arguments like 16fps terminal is better than 7500 one because so many fps would probably consume to much resources.
Before I found Casey's tone criticizing bad software off putting but now I understand that after many years of such arguments it takes toll on you.
- thom 5y agoWorth bearing in mind that Casey has a long history of unsuccessfully trying to nudge Microsoft to care about performance and the fact that he's still being constructive about it is to his credit.
- stephc_int13 5y agoI highly respect Casey but given his abrasive communication style I sometimes wonder if he is not trying to trigger people (MS devs in this case) to push him back so he can make his point.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoSeconding. It takes doing some low-level gamedev[0] stuff, or using software written by people like Casey, to realize just how fast software can be. There's an art to it, and it hits diminishing returns with complex software, but the baseline of popular software is so low it doesn't take much more than a pinch of care to beat it by an order of magnitude. (Cue in the "but why bother, my app is IO bound anyway" counterarguments. That happens, but people too often forget you can design software to avoid or minimize the time spent waiting on IO. And I don't mean just "use async" - I mean design its whole structure and UX alike to manage waits better.) -- [0] - Or HFT, or browser engine development, few other performance-mindful areas of software.
- mnl 5y agoI find it striking that a decent modern laptop would have been a supercomputer 20 years ago, when people used Office 97 that was feature complete already IMO. I can't help this constant cognitive dissonance with modern software; do we really need supercomputers to move Windows out of the box?
- TeMPOraL 5y agoWe need some extra processing power to support larger screens and refresh rates. Arguably, security benefits of managed code / sandboxing are worth it - but the runtimes seem to be pretty-well optimized. Other than that, I don't see anything reasonable to justify the low performance of most software.
- rich_sasha 5y agoI'd imagine software is bloated and grown until is it still-just-about usable on modern hardware. Making it faster there is probably seen as premature optimisation. I'd imagine perhaps this is how product teams are assessed - is the component just-about fast enough, and does it have lots of features. So long as MS Office is the most feature-rich software package, enterprise will buy nothing else, slow or not.
- mark-r 5y agoIt doesn't even need to be the most feature-rich any more. Microsoft has figured out that the key is corporate licensing. Is Teams better than Zoom? No, but my last employer ditched Zoom because Teams was already included in their enterprise license package and they didn't want to pay twice for the same functionality.
- StillBored 5y ago"support larger screens and refresh rates" Uh, yah 4k, etc but most of the modern machines are still 1920x1080@60hz. Which is only 8% larger than 1600x1200 which wasn't an uncommon resolution in the late 1990's, usually running at 75Hz or better over analog vga cables. So its actually _LESS_ bandwidth, which is why many of us cried about the decade+ of regression in resolution/refresh brought on by the LCD manufactures deciding computer monitors weren't worthy of being anything but overpriced TV screens. Its still ongoing, but at least there are some alternatives now. It is possible to get office97 (or for that matter 2003, which is one of the last non sucky versions) and run it on a modern machine. It does basically everything instantly, including starting. So I don't really think resolution is the problem. PS, I've had multiple monitors since the late 80's too, in various forms, in the late 1990's driving multiple large CRTs at high resolution from secondary PCI graphics cards, until they started coming with multiple ports (thanks matrox!) for reasonable prices.
- moron4hire 5y agoHonestly, I felt like the ones to start with the condescending tones were the Microsoft devs who kept talking down to Casey about You Don't Understand How Hard This Is, when they also readily admitted they didn't understand the internals very well.
- mwcampbell 5y agoI don't think they're actually contradicting themselves there. They know enough about how hard text rendering is to conclude that they're better off delegating it to the team that specializes in that particular area, even though it means they have to settle for a good-enough abstraction rather than winning at a benchmark.
- nomel 5y agoEnterprise deployment of a Somebody Else’s Problem field can really harm innovation, “Any object around which an S.E.P. is applied will cease to be noticed, because any problems one may have understanding it (and therefore accepting its existence) become Somebody Else's Problem.”
- db48x 5y agoAgree. Rendering text well really is hard, if you sit down and try to do it from scratch. It’s just that dealing with all of the wonderful quirks of human languages doesn’t have to make it _slow_. That’s their mistake. And you’re right; all refterm really does is move the glyph cache out to the GPU rather than copying pixels from a glyph cache in main memory every frame.