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The question could be steel-manned when restated as: why does today's average app, in order to complete an ordinary task - like displaying a series of character

The question could be steel-manned when restated as: why does today's average app, in order to complete an ordinary task - like displaying a series of characters on the screen - need to run 1000x more CPU instructions than yesterday's? Replace "1000" with whatever that multiplier, result of the proliferation of intermediary abstraction layers, actually is. I wouldn't be surprised if it is even more than one thousand, at least extrapolating from this article, which was also posted on this site today: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/

moffkalast 4y ago
Well aside from the usual Wirth's law answer, the key is high abstraction on all levels, which brings bloat with it. Eventually that bloat will get optimized, as that chart interestingly shows iphone responsiveness being somewhat corelated with increasing years. Same with Windows, where there was a sizable abstraction jump with Vista, which then got slowly optimized over 7, 8 and 10. There's even abstraction in memory management now, with 64 bit virtual address mapping. I've recently stumbled upon these ARM benchmarks https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Results.md https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Result... and was surprised that the Pi 4 runs 10-50% slower in 64 bit mode compared to 32 bit. I'd expect there was also a notable speed decrease when going from 8 to 16 and 32 bit systems, since there's twice as much address data to fetch and process.
dagw 4y ago
like displaying a series of characters on the screen - need to run 1000x more CPU instructions than yesterday's? Because the users want those characters displayed in the font, size and colour of their choosing at a very high dpi, anti-aliased, in a semi-translucent terminal. They might also want the text parsed in real time so that it can be coloured, formatted and checked for spelling and grammar.
- kjkjadksj 4y ago
  Other than the high dpi you could do that in 1995 microsoft word.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  And because the programmers want to write it in an interpreted virtual machine ran language with dynamic typing.
  - dagw 4y ago
    True, that as well.
- bzzzt 4y ago
  Don't forget they want full Unicode support with all the complicated layout and composition rules.

moffkalast 4y ago

Well aside from the usual Wirth's law answer, the key is high abstraction on all levels, which brings bloat with it. Eventually that bloat will get optimized, as that chart interestingly shows iphone responsiveness being somewhat corelated with increasing years. Same with Windows, where there was a sizable abstraction jump with Vista, which then got slowly optimized over 7, 8 and 10. There's even abstraction in memory management now, with 64 bit virtual address mapping. I've recently stumbled upon these ARM benchmarks https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Results.md https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Result... and was surprised that the Pi 4 runs 10-50% slower in 64 bit mode compared to 32 bit. I'd expect there was also a notable speed decrease when going from 8 to 16 and 32 bit systems, since there's twice as much address data to fetch and process.

dagw 4y ago

like displaying a series of characters on the screen - need to run 1000x more CPU instructions than yesterday's? Because the users want those characters displayed in the font, size and colour of their choosing at a very high dpi, anti-aliased, in a semi-translucent terminal. They might also want the text parsed in real time so that it can be coloured, formatted and checked for spelling and grammar.

kjkjadksj 4y ago
Other than the high dpi you could do that in 1995 microsoft word.
moffkalast 4y ago
And because the programmers want to write it in an interpreted virtual machine ran language with dynamic typing.
- dagw 4y ago
  True, that as well.
bzzzt 4y ago
Don't forget they want full Unicode support with all the complicated layout and composition rules.