4 ms·

It's comforting reading this. Too often web aps are developed thinking about ease of development/developer convenience alone, on fast hw, with fast and reliable

It's comforting reading this. Too often web aps are developed thinking about ease of development/developer convenience alone, on fast hw, with fast and reliable network. If those same developers used a 10 years old PC and a semicrappy 4g netwrk I bet the overall quality of the products that comes out would be ten times better.

maccard 4y ago
I don't think that extreme is true either. I work in games and we have access to workstation hardware even though most of our players will inevitably end up playing on substantially lower end hardware. We set performance targets for subsystems, have thorough profiling available, and regularly _test_ on consumer hardware to gain the above metrics and work with them. That can be (and often is) done.
- solardev 4y ago
  I think game devs are on the opposite side of the spectrum from web devs when it comes to performance testing, though. PC gaming has always been performance-driven, and performance variability/customization has been part of the end-user experience since the first 3dfx cards and graphics settings screen (and before that too). Web... until recently it wasn't really a consideration for users or devs, because everything was just basic HTML and CSS and it was big images or videos that was the problem. Then, within like a decade, suddenly all these JS-heavy frameworks took over and everyone jumped on board, and connectivity has struggled to keep pace. Web developers (the humans) too struggled to keep up, with everyone having to relearn the framework du jour every year or two, with all the optimization techniques of the previous generations thrown out or made irrelevant by new frameworks & browser optimizations. I've never met a web dev who seriously even considered performance beyond some superficial metrics -- I've never seen anyone use the profiler in Chrome or their IDE at all -- much less knew what to do about it even if they did. It's just not really a thing, at least in the small to med business space. Maybe if you're working in big tech or framework development that's different, but otherwise, performance is near the bottom of considerations for web dev. Which is why we have articles like this every once in a while... it's actually newsworthy when people go "hey, JS is slow again, here's technique #33 million to speed it up", to which most of us will go "oh, that's nice, but I can't replace my whole stack just for one speedup, and besides, this new thing is going to be obsolete by September anyway."

maccard 4y ago

I don't think that extreme is true either. I work in games and we have access to workstation hardware even though most of our players will inevitably end up playing on substantially lower end hardware. We set performance targets for subsystems, have thorough profiling available, and regularly _test_ on consumer hardware to gain the above metrics and work with them. That can be (and often is) done.

solardev 4y ago
I think game devs are on the opposite side of the spectrum from web devs when it comes to performance testing, though. PC gaming has always been performance-driven, and performance variability/customization has been part of the end-user experience since the first 3dfx cards and graphics settings screen (and before that too). Web... until recently it wasn't really a consideration for users or devs, because everything was just basic HTML and CSS and it was big images or videos that was the problem. Then, within like a decade, suddenly all these JS-heavy frameworks took over and everyone jumped on board, and connectivity has struggled to keep pace. Web developers (the humans) too struggled to keep up, with everyone having to relearn the framework du jour every year or two, with all the optimization techniques of the previous generations thrown out or made irrelevant by new frameworks & browser optimizations. I've never met a web dev who seriously even considered performance beyond some superficial metrics -- I've never seen anyone use the profiler in Chrome or their IDE at all -- much less knew what to do about it even if they did. It's just not really a thing, at least in the small to med business space. Maybe if you're working in big tech or framework development that's different, but otherwise, performance is near the bottom of considerations for web dev. Which is why we have articles like this every once in a while... it's actually newsworthy when people go "hey, JS is slow again, here's technique #33 million to speed it up", to which most of us will go "oh, that's nice, but I can't replace my whole stack just for one speedup, and besides, this new thing is going to be obsolete by September anyway."