>I've got many systems I've written that are just straight-up accidentally soft-real-time in practice simply because running them on even a moderately-powerful

>I've got many systems I've written that are just straight-up accidentally soft-real-time in practice simply because running them on even a moderately-powerful modern PC is a hundred times more power than they really need, and they're already 10-50 times faster than they "need" to be even before optimizing them, so barring pathological network performance that would trash any system, they're essentially soft real time already. But the categorization of real-time depends on the requirements of the problem, not how difficult it is to meet them. If your problem tolerates a few missed deadlines every now and then and your hardware is such that a naive implementation misses deadlines so frequently that it's useless, and so you need to optimize it thoroughly to get the misses under control, it's still soft real-time. It doesn't become soft real-time when technology advances enough that even an inefficient implementation will tolerably a deadline only occasionally.