6 ms·

> What happened here? three things, I think: 1) people saying (and believing) that CPU, RAM, and disk are fast enough and cheap enough to be effectively infin

> What happened here? three things, I think: 1) people saying (and believing) that CPU, RAM, and disk are fast enough and cheap enough to be effectively infinite, and no longer worthy of concern. put another way: developers feeling that their target platforms are no longer constrained. 2) many software developers simply stopped caring about performance and began implementing all kinds of things extremely naively. new developers do this continually for many years early in their careers. 3) JavaScript. the places this language is used today, where it should never, ever be used. excruciatingly slow language. and JavaScript is EVERYWHERE, even on extremely constrained platforms, doing work, when almost any other language would have been a better choice.

qudat 5y ago
> 3) JavaScript. the places this language is used today, where it should never, ever be used. excruciatingly slow language. [citation needed] Slow, fast are relative terms. What are you comparing it against?
methyl 5y ago
Javascript is one of the fastest dynamically typed languages. People use it instead of other languages because the productivity of dynamically typed languages is generally higher. I’d be interested in hearing what are those other languages that would be faster to run and not slower to program in.
- eloisius 5y ago
  "Not slower to program in" is a cost savings to the business, but let's be honest about that being what it is. It's a cost savings for the business that results in a crummier product for customers. Just like trimming a single tomato from the salad on in-flight meals is a cost savings to Delta. Doesn't mean it's a "better" salad.
  - methyl 5y ago
    It's a question of having it or not at all. Poor salad is better than no salad.
    - eloisius 5y ago
      As far as I can tell, it's a question of having or not having whizbang bloated apps like Slack, but we had perfectly acceptable word processors, spreadsheets, 3D modeling tools, etc a long time ago. The current gen, JS-powered versions of those tools (Google Drive, Quip, Notion) all feel slower. Sure, there are fewer BSODs now so it probably evens out, but the extremely low latency UX of those tools back in the Windows 2000/XP days is lost.
      - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
        Yet Figma blows Illustrator and Sketch out of the water. A lot it’s really just down to developer talent and how much they care about it. Examples exist in the world proving it’s possible. Illustrator is slow for the same reasons, no one working on it cares about what they’re building. But still it would need 10x speed improvements in multiple areas to beat Figma now.
        eloisius 5y ago
        And Office360 is about as bad as Google Docs. It's honestly probably not a JavaScript problem. Some mixture of businesses not giving a damn about quality because it's more profitable to play the acquire-integrate-exterminate game than make quality software, lower barrier to entry meaning we get more developers who are productive because of better tooling, but probably in over their heads making performance-critical things like input controls in JavaScript, and piles of new abstractions without the old abstractions ever going away.
- naikrovek 5y ago
  > the productivity of dynamically typed languages is generally higher. This is the assumption, yes, and I am not sure that it's true at all; people simply believe it to be true rather than actually check to see if their assumptions are correct. I believe this to be a very false assumption, in reality. The number of lines of JS that I see which do a particular thing is very high compared to other languages. This is not a JavaScript example, but it goes to my point that our assumptions are wrong: For example, can someone explain to me why a the Dropbox Desktop client 3 years ago was 4 million lines of Python?[0] If Python is such a high-level language, why are so many lines of code needed to do such a simple thing? [0]: https://dropbox.tech/application/our-journey-to-type-checking-4-million-lines-of-python https://dropbox.tech/application/our-journey-to-type-checkin...
  - pflanze 5y ago
    The "4 million lines of Python" in that article is referring to the number of lines that are type checked (I don't see any mention of how much code remained unchecked, although the graphs might imply some 20%), but it also includes Dropbox' server side code base; the shown graphs imply that the server side is 4x larger than the client side. Assuming the above implications are true, the client side app would be 1 million lines of code. I guess someone with the client could go and measure? I don't mean to say that 1 M loc isn't still large, but you seem to be drawing conclusions from using numbers incorrectly.
    - naikrovek 5y ago
      ok, over 1M lines of code... ...For the Dropbox client. line count from: (https://dropbox.tech/application/incrementally-migrating-over-one-million-lines-of-code-from-python-2-to-python-3 https://dropbox.tech/application/incrementally-migrating-ove...) how high-level are "high-level" languages? I would say that it would take far fewer lines of C or even Assembly to accomplish the same goals. 50k lines of C, probably. XTerm is ~70k lines of C, if I recall (I am certainly within 0.5 orders of magnitude), and it is extremely complex and does much more. if you want a more direct comparison, look at rsync or syncthing. I haven't looked at the size of those, ever, but I'd be willing to bet that both are FAR smaller than 1M lines of code. So, how it acceptable that a high-level language requires more lines of code than a "lower-level" language like C or Go? we're supposed to GAIN SOMETHING in the tradeoff by using high-level languages, and we're not. certainly not as much as we assume we are. we need to pay attention to these assumptions that we're making to ensure that they're true, periodically. we're not. it's just accepted as fact that "high-level" languages require fewer lines of code and less work to produce high-quality software, and I don't think we're seeing the benefits of the tradeoff anymore, if we ever really did, outside of tiny example programs.
- anthk 5y ago
  Eh, try OcaML against JS.
bodge5000 5y ago
> many software developers simply stopped caring about performance... Little "conspiracy" theory here if you can call it that, and not one that a lot of people will agree with I imagine, but I sometimes think this was caused by the mass adoption of "premature optimisation is the root of all evil". The problem is, for a lot of devs, quite possibly myself included, its either premature or an afterthought. With mass adoption of that phrase, it becomes an afterthought. For me, for better or worse, I can't get out of it. It doesn't mean I never write inefficient software, especially in my day job I come into conflict with that, but its always the first thing in my mind. Maybe I'm way off base there and just trying to justify bad habits, but I can't say it feels bad to me.
- MaulingMonkey 5y ago
  Premature optimization is time spent not optimizing things that actually matter. In my own circles, it's the accusation legitimately levied against the clowns who simultaniously write macros instead of functions out of fears that the compiler could theoretically ignore a __forceinline keyword - or if you're lucky, optimizing some microbenchmark while pessimizing overall program performance - and in the next breath writing O(scary) code that'll be invoked with large enough N to demolish any savings from micro-optimizations. That is, despite optimizing, these are people who, despite an obsession with performance, are still treating the performance of their overall programs as an afterthought. Because they don't actually care about performance as much as they say: they care about showing off and flexing their coding skills by making a mess. Well, the phrase itself doesn't help guide these people towards real performance engineering, but they're typically stubborn enough to ignore the phrase, and must instead be goaded into using a profiler or generating benchmarks, which can then be picked apart when they optimize away the actual execution of everything at compile time, teaching by way of concrete example at least a little bit about generating better microbenchmarks, which they can use to show off and flex more effectively instead.
  - liveoneggs 5y ago
    > are still treating the performance of their overall programs as an afterthought Because that is harder to test
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I don't believe software developers stopped caring about performance per se myself. There's a tradeoff between performance and productivity being made. If you can build a cross-platform app in a JS / React Native app at half the time it would take to make two native apps (+ maintenance over years), a lot will quickly opt for productivity, because a working and launched app always beats a fast app. usually. Personally I'm of the opinion that companies should just spend the money and build native apps, accepting that feature parity may be lagging between one or the other app, but that's me. Anyway the other issue is that developers will be working on faster machines (on average) than end users, so they won't feel or notice the perf issues so much. And they get used to it really fast.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  I suspect that once you decide to build a quality app the difference in development costs disappear. VSCode is what people put forward as an example of a good Electron app but that has required a huge amount of work to be just about good enough.
- andai 5y ago
  Re: powerful dev machines "hiding" poor performance For this reason I hold the belief that software should be developed for (if not on) 10 year old machines. Thanks to this thread I might update that mark to 20 or 30 ;) That might sound absurd, but whatever you're making, there was probably something similar already there a few decades ago, ran fine on the hardware of the day, the binary was 100x smaller, it used hundreds of times less RAM... so that it can be done is evidenced by the fact that thousands of people have done it already! Now of course, modern CPU features, advanced use of the GPU and using more RAM can make things much faster. Such optimizations are fine, to be sure, but non-pessimization needs to come first! (Of course there's also many strong arguments to be made for actually supporting older and weaker hardware, mainly it's needlessly wasteful not to, and people will actually be able to use your software if you do!)

qudat 5y ago

> 3) JavaScript. the places this language is used today, where it should never, ever be used. excruciatingly slow language. [citation needed] Slow, fast are relative terms. What are you comparing it against?

methyl 5y ago

Javascript is one of the fastest dynamically typed languages. People use it instead of other languages because the productivity of dynamically typed languages is generally higher. I’d be interested in hearing what are those other languages that would be faster to run and not slower to program in.

eloisius 5y ago
"Not slower to program in" is a cost savings to the business, but let's be honest about that being what it is. It's a cost savings for the business that results in a crummier product for customers. Just like trimming a single tomato from the salad on in-flight meals is a cost savings to Delta. Doesn't mean it's a "better" salad.
- methyl 5y ago
  It's a question of having it or not at all. Poor salad is better than no salad.
  - eloisius 5y ago
    As far as I can tell, it's a question of having or not having whizbang bloated apps like Slack, but we had perfectly acceptable word processors, spreadsheets, 3D modeling tools, etc a long time ago. The current gen, JS-powered versions of those tools (Google Drive, Quip, Notion) all feel slower. Sure, there are fewer BSODs now so it probably evens out, but the extremely low latency UX of those tools back in the Windows 2000/XP days is lost.
    - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
      Yet Figma blows Illustrator and Sketch out of the water. A lot it’s really just down to developer talent and how much they care about it. Examples exist in the world proving it’s possible. Illustrator is slow for the same reasons, no one working on it cares about what they’re building. But still it would need 10x speed improvements in multiple areas to beat Figma now.
      - eloisius 5y ago
        And Office360 is about as bad as Google Docs. It's honestly probably not a JavaScript problem. Some mixture of businesses not giving a damn about quality because it's more profitable to play the acquire-integrate-exterminate game than make quality software, lower barrier to entry meaning we get more developers who are productive because of better tooling, but probably in over their heads making performance-critical things like input controls in JavaScript, and piles of new abstractions without the old abstractions ever going away.
naikrovek 5y ago
> the productivity of dynamically typed languages is generally higher. This is the assumption, yes, and I am not sure that it's true at all; people simply believe it to be true rather than actually check to see if their assumptions are correct. I believe this to be a very false assumption, in reality. The number of lines of JS that I see which do a particular thing is very high compared to other languages. This is not a JavaScript example, but it goes to my point that our assumptions are wrong: For example, can someone explain to me why a the Dropbox Desktop client 3 years ago was 4 million lines of Python?[0] If Python is such a high-level language, why are so many lines of code needed to do such a simple thing? [0]: https://dropbox.tech/application/our-journey-to-type-checking-4-million-lines-of-python https://dropbox.tech/application/our-journey-to-type-checkin...
- pflanze 5y ago
  The "4 million lines of Python" in that article is referring to the number of lines that are type checked (I don't see any mention of how much code remained unchecked, although the graphs might imply some 20%), but it also includes Dropbox' server side code base; the shown graphs imply that the server side is 4x larger than the client side. Assuming the above implications are true, the client side app would be 1 million lines of code. I guess someone with the client could go and measure? I don't mean to say that 1 M loc isn't still large, but you seem to be drawing conclusions from using numbers incorrectly.
  - naikrovek 5y ago
    ok, over 1M lines of code... ...For the Dropbox client. line count from: (https://dropbox.tech/application/incrementally-migrating-over-one-million-lines-of-code-from-python-2-to-python-3 https://dropbox.tech/application/incrementally-migrating-ove...) how high-level are "high-level" languages? I would say that it would take far fewer lines of C or even Assembly to accomplish the same goals. 50k lines of C, probably. XTerm is ~70k lines of C, if I recall (I am certainly within 0.5 orders of magnitude), and it is extremely complex and does much more. if you want a more direct comparison, look at rsync or syncthing. I haven't looked at the size of those, ever, but I'd be willing to bet that both are FAR smaller than 1M lines of code. So, how it acceptable that a high-level language requires more lines of code than a "lower-level" language like C or Go? we're supposed to GAIN SOMETHING in the tradeoff by using high-level languages, and we're not. certainly not as much as we assume we are. we need to pay attention to these assumptions that we're making to ensure that they're true, periodically. we're not. it's just accepted as fact that "high-level" languages require fewer lines of code and less work to produce high-quality software, and I don't think we're seeing the benefits of the tradeoff anymore, if we ever really did, outside of tiny example programs.
anthk 5y ago
Eh, try OcaML against JS.

bodge5000 5y ago

> many software developers simply stopped caring about performance... Little "conspiracy" theory here if you can call it that, and not one that a lot of people will agree with I imagine, but I sometimes think this was caused by the mass adoption of "premature optimisation is the root of all evil". The problem is, for a lot of devs, quite possibly myself included, its either premature or an afterthought. With mass adoption of that phrase, it becomes an afterthought. For me, for better or worse, I can't get out of it. It doesn't mean I never write inefficient software, especially in my day job I come into conflict with that, but its always the first thing in my mind. Maybe I'm way off base there and just trying to justify bad habits, but I can't say it feels bad to me.

MaulingMonkey 5y ago
Premature optimization is time spent not optimizing things that actually matter. In my own circles, it's the accusation legitimately levied against the clowns who simultaniously write macros instead of functions out of fears that the compiler could theoretically ignore a __forceinline keyword - or if you're lucky, optimizing some microbenchmark while pessimizing overall program performance - and in the next breath writing O(scary) code that'll be invoked with large enough N to demolish any savings from micro-optimizations. That is, despite optimizing, these are people who, despite an obsession with performance, are still treating the performance of their overall programs as an afterthought. Because they don't actually care about performance as much as they say: they care about showing off and flexing their coding skills by making a mess. Well, the phrase itself doesn't help guide these people towards real performance engineering, but they're typically stubborn enough to ignore the phrase, and must instead be goaded into using a profiler or generating benchmarks, which can then be picked apart when they optimize away the actual execution of everything at compile time, teaching by way of concrete example at least a little bit about generating better microbenchmarks, which they can use to show off and flex more effectively instead.
- liveoneggs 5y ago
  > are still treating the performance of their overall programs as an afterthought Because that is harder to test

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

I don't believe software developers stopped caring about performance per se myself. There's a tradeoff between performance and productivity being made. If you can build a cross-platform app in a JS / React Native app at half the time it would take to make two native apps (+ maintenance over years), a lot will quickly opt for productivity, because a working and launched app always beats a fast app. usually. Personally I'm of the opinion that companies should just spend the money and build native apps, accepting that feature parity may be lagging between one or the other app, but that's me. Anyway the other issue is that developers will be working on faster machines (on average) than end users, so they won't feel or notice the perf issues so much. And they get used to it really fast.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
I suspect that once you decide to build a quality app the difference in development costs disappear. VSCode is what people put forward as an example of a good Electron app but that has required a huge amount of work to be just about good enough.
andai 5y ago
Re: powerful dev machines "hiding" poor performance For this reason I hold the belief that software should be developed for (if not on) 10 year old machines. Thanks to this thread I might update that mark to 20 or 30 ;) That might sound absurd, but whatever you're making, there was probably something similar already there a few decades ago, ran fine on the hardware of the day, the binary was 100x smaller, it used hundreds of times less RAM... so that it can be done is evidenced by the fact that thousands of people have done it already! Now of course, modern CPU features, advanced use of the GPU and using more RAM can make things much faster. Such optimizations are fine, to be sure, but non-pessimization needs to come first! (Of course there's also many strong arguments to be made for actually supporting older and weaker hardware, mainly it's needlessly wasteful not to, and people will actually be able to use your software if you do!)