4 ms·

I look forward to Moore's law ending, because then software might actually become good again (lol probably not)

by vinyl7 4y ago

FPGAhacker 4y ago
No kidding, almost 30 years later and windows still finds a way to make my work computer run like crap. Looking at a flame graph 60 levels deep demonstrates the problem pretty well I think.
iveqy 4y ago
Software seems like a very immature field where we can still do a lot to increase performance. I'm looking forward to the shift
- vinyl7 4y ago
  Software has become more immature over the last decades because developers lost the engineering mindset and skills to write optimized software like they could back in the days where we only had a couple of MB of ram. It really does not require new expertise or tech at all to cut latency and load times by 90%. Programmers have to get back to being engineers instead of just duct taping libraries together or praying that the dumb GC knows what its doing
  - hajile 4y ago
    Are customers willing to pay 10x the cost for the mildly better experience? At most places, there’s barely enough time to implement things completely let alone to optimize everything properly. It’s also noteworthy that optimizing 10kloc from yesteryear is a much easier task than optimizing a few mloc of code today. We didn’t just lose all those optimized libraries. The requirements bloated and nobody wants to reduce features.
    - vinyl7 4y ago
      I would argue that the only reason we went from 10kloc to +1mloc is because of the proliferation of bad coding practices...like OOP
- stn_za 4y ago
  Simple. Kill Electron immediately, fucking Slack being so slow on a multi core modern PC is ridiculous. It's IRC ffs.
DeathArrow 4y ago
Just going from Python to Java or C# will give us a 95% economy in energy. Going from web apps in JS packaged for desktop or mobile to C or C++ would yield a similar gain.
- PostOnce 4y ago
  Only in programs with 100% cpu use? If Python or JS sit idle waiting for user input, are the efficiencies really so different? Developer time also has energy cost in AC, transport, etc for a human. What about the fact that the cost of web inefficiency is offloaded to the user? Users pay the power bill for the overcomplicated, slow, unnecessarily CPU intensive front end. So, at a surface level, what you say is true, but the deeper picture is complicated. The tooling, too, has gone a certain way... making a native GUI is now slower, less documented, less catered-to than web UI; in my opinion, for most simple to moderately complex UIs, native is going to take twice as long to make look good... but that inverts, in my experience, as the program and UI become more complicated. It's also strange that the UI itself is so bloated and developmentally time consuming. We lived on the CLI once -- maybe in some not too distant future a killer app can once again show consumers the power of the command line. After all, google/Siri/Alexa do just that.
  - grumpyprole 4y ago
    > If Python or JS sit idle waiting for user input, are the efficiencies really so different? Nit pick: Python is typically at least an order of magnitude slower than JS, it's a whole different class of slow. > Developer time also has energy cost in AC, transport, etc for a human. Yes and fixing bugs in production is especially expensive. Presumably that's why Python is now trying to retrofit static types. There are statically typed languages that are just as terse as Python.

I look forward to Moore's law ending, because then software might actually become good again (lol probably not)

by vinyl7 4y ago

I look forward to Moore's law ending, because then software might actually become good again (lol probably not)

No kidding, almost 30 years later and windows still finds a way to make my work computer run like crap. Looking at a flame graph 60 levels deep demonstrates the problem pretty well I think.

iveqy 4y ago

Software seems like a very immature field where we can still do a lot to increase performance. I'm looking forward to the shift

vinyl7 4y ago
Software has become more immature over the last decades because developers lost the engineering mindset and skills to write optimized software like they could back in the days where we only had a couple of MB of ram. It really does not require new expertise or tech at all to cut latency and load times by 90%. Programmers have to get back to being engineers instead of just duct taping libraries together or praying that the dumb GC knows what its doing
- hajile 4y ago
  Are customers willing to pay 10x the cost for the mildly better experience? At most places, there’s barely enough time to implement things completely let alone to optimize everything properly. It’s also noteworthy that optimizing 10kloc from yesteryear is a much easier task than optimizing a few mloc of code today. We didn’t just lose all those optimized libraries. The requirements bloated and nobody wants to reduce features.
  - vinyl7 4y ago
    I would argue that the only reason we went from 10kloc to +1mloc is because of the proliferation of bad coding practices...like OOP
stn_za 4y ago
Simple. Kill Electron immediately, fucking Slack being so slow on a multi core modern PC is ridiculous. It's IRC ffs.

DeathArrow 4y ago

Just going from Python to Java or C# will give us a 95% economy in energy. Going from web apps in JS packaged for desktop or mobile to C or C++ would yield a similar gain.

PostOnce 4y ago
Only in programs with 100% cpu use? If Python or JS sit idle waiting for user input, are the efficiencies really so different? Developer time also has energy cost in AC, transport, etc for a human. What about the fact that the cost of web inefficiency is offloaded to the user? Users pay the power bill for the overcomplicated, slow, unnecessarily CPU intensive front end. So, at a surface level, what you say is true, but the deeper picture is complicated. The tooling, too, has gone a certain way... making a native GUI is now slower, less documented, less catered-to than web UI; in my opinion, for most simple to moderately complex UIs, native is going to take twice as long to make look good... but that inverts, in my experience, as the program and UI become more complicated. It's also strange that the UI itself is so bloated and developmentally time consuming. We lived on the CLI once -- maybe in some not too distant future a killer app can once again show consumers the power of the command line. After all, google/Siri/Alexa do just that.
- grumpyprole 4y ago
  > If Python or JS sit idle waiting for user input, are the efficiencies really so different? Nit pick: Python is typically at least an order of magnitude slower than JS, it's a whole different class of slow. > Developer time also has energy cost in AC, transport, etc for a human. Yes and fixing bugs in production is especially expensive. Presumably that's why Python is now trying to retrofit static types. There are statically typed languages that are just as terse as Python.