4 ms·

Back when programming was an art and a programmer needed to know the underlying hardware that the software was running on intimately. Nowadays the nearest you g

Back when programming was an art and a programmer needed to know the underlying hardware that the software was running on intimately. Nowadays the nearest you get to that is with embedded programming. Makes you wonder why computers need to get faster so that we can run the latest code.

erwincoumans 5y ago
Agreed 0xFCE2! Indeed, the game industry and robotics still care about performance, since it affects joy (we want smooth framerates, VR headsets can make you sick as low frames per second) and safety (robot control often has real-time requirements). My first computer was a commodore 64 (like you?) and I care about performance, so I enjoy working in those areas.
- mburee 5y ago
  I really think most game devs don't reallzcare about performance, how many games out there use more than one core/thread? There's so much game engine/abstraction hell going on, I can't imagine they could care a lot about what's going on at a low level
  - erwincoumans 5y ago
    Indeed, I was referring to C++ or Rust game engine developers. For example Teardown, by Dennis Gustafsson: https://mobile.twitter.com/tuxedolabs?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/tuxedolabs?lang=en a nice game and well optimized c++ custom game engine. Many game developers use Unreal Engine or Unity, thise game engines have been optimized pretty well.
- bluedino 5y ago
  Don't forget about HFT
moffkalast 5y ago
> why computers need to get faster so that we can run the latest code Wirth's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
jameshart 5y ago
This grossly understates the level of complexity involved in even the simplest things we take for granted in general purpose operating systems on general purpose hardware nowadays. In order for you to read this comment, your computer is interacting at an astonishing speed with possibly wireless networking hardware, transmitting, receiving and error correcting on the fly in order to establish a secure, trustworthy connection to a server, from which it can receive an encrypted message containing the text of this message. Having received it, together with a bunch of high level layout instructions, your machine has then determined how to lay out a visual display of hundreds of thousands of pixels, drawing at sub pixel resolution dynamic glyphs drawn from font data that it is loading on demand from a storage medium that indexes data using a permission-based filesystem and continually optimizes the arrangement of the data. Your computer may never have been called upon to draw this symbol in this particular typeface and size and color before: 喜 - yet it can do so almost instantaneously when you browse to this comment. Isn’t that kind of magical? Those glyphs are composited over a color background and sent to a high resolution display device with at least two orders of magnitude more pixels than a ZX spectrum. While all this is going on you can be running a dozen more equally complex operations. You might have an audio file or data stream playing, or even a video stream. Don’t make the mistake of underestimating the vast gulf of capability between an ‘80s 8 bit micro and a modern computer.
- gus_massa 5y ago
  You forgot real time orthography and gramar checking while I'm writing this comment. When I was young, you had to press a special button to make WinWord find the pile of errors you made. When I was younger, the ZX Spectrum had no spell checker.
  - jameshart 5y ago
    Reading back over my comment I could have used some of that :) But yes, I was focused on just pulling down and displaying a comment, not even touching on the input processing capabilities. And this is stuff that a computer does without even breaking a sweat - this is just constant background activity supporting the vastly more complex stuff the machine can do if you task it to. A ZX Spectrum reading data from a tape drive at about 1400 bits per second required almost its entire CPU’s attention. At that speed just loading the 1614 UTF8 bytes of my comment above into memory would take over 9 seconds, during which time the computer is doing literally nothing else.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Your comment reminded me of The Story of Mel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel
- the_af 5y ago
  Mel would disapprove of modern computers.

erwincoumans 5y ago

Agreed 0xFCE2! Indeed, the game industry and robotics still care about performance, since it affects joy (we want smooth framerates, VR headsets can make you sick as low frames per second) and safety (robot control often has real-time requirements). My first computer was a commodore 64 (like you?) and I care about performance, so I enjoy working in those areas.

mburee 5y ago
I really think most game devs don't reallzcare about performance, how many games out there use more than one core/thread? There's so much game engine/abstraction hell going on, I can't imagine they could care a lot about what's going on at a low level
- erwincoumans 5y ago
  Indeed, I was referring to C++ or Rust game engine developers. For example Teardown, by Dennis Gustafsson: https://mobile.twitter.com/tuxedolabs?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/tuxedolabs?lang=en a nice game and well optimized c++ custom game engine. Many game developers use Unreal Engine or Unity, thise game engines have been optimized pretty well.
bluedino 5y ago
Don't forget about HFT

moffkalast 5y ago

> why computers need to get faster so that we can run the latest code Wirth's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

jameshart 5y ago

This grossly understates the level of complexity involved in even the simplest things we take for granted in general purpose operating systems on general purpose hardware nowadays. In order for you to read this comment, your computer is interacting at an astonishing speed with possibly wireless networking hardware, transmitting, receiving and error correcting on the fly in order to establish a secure, trustworthy connection to a server, from which it can receive an encrypted message containing the text of this message. Having received it, together with a bunch of high level layout instructions, your machine has then determined how to lay out a visual display of hundreds of thousands of pixels, drawing at sub pixel resolution dynamic glyphs drawn from font data that it is loading on demand from a storage medium that indexes data using a permission-based filesystem and continually optimizes the arrangement of the data. Your computer may never have been called upon to draw this symbol in this particular typeface and size and color before: 喜 - yet it can do so almost instantaneously when you browse to this comment. Isn’t that kind of magical? Those glyphs are composited over a color background and sent to a high resolution display device with at least two orders of magnitude more pixels than a ZX spectrum. While all this is going on you can be running a dozen more equally complex operations. You might have an audio file or data stream playing, or even a video stream. Don’t make the mistake of underestimating the vast gulf of capability between an ‘80s 8 bit micro and a modern computer.

gus_massa 5y ago
You forgot real time orthography and gramar checking while I'm writing this comment. When I was young, you had to press a special button to make WinWord find the pile of errors you made. When I was younger, the ZX Spectrum had no spell checker.
- jameshart 5y ago
  Reading back over my comment I could have used some of that :) But yes, I was focused on just pulling down and displaying a comment, not even touching on the input processing capabilities. And this is stuff that a computer does without even breaking a sweat - this is just constant background activity supporting the vastly more complex stuff the machine can do if you task it to. A ZX Spectrum reading data from a tape drive at about 1400 bits per second required almost its entire CPU’s attention. At that speed just loading the 1614 UTF8 bytes of my comment above into memory would take over 9 seconds, during which time the computer is doing literally nothing else.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Your comment reminded me of The Story of Mel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel

the_af 5y ago
Mel would disapprove of modern computers.