7 ms·
If working in the modern software industry has taught me anything, it's that developers can figure out how to write slow janky UIs no matter how powerful the pr
by TheDong 4y ago
If working in the modern software industry has taught me anything, it's that developers can figure out how to write slow janky UIs no matter how powerful the processor.
I'd go so far as to say there's an inverse correlation here. My 100Mhz desktop had a more responsive UI than any computer I've used in the last 5 years.
Text editing on that 100Mhz computer felt responsive, typing characters had them appear on the screen instantly, I could copy+paste 100s of lines of text without a problem.
Now, I load notion.so on a 4Ghz cpu, and typing is sluggish, scrolling has severe lag, and pasting 100 lines of text sometimes takes several seconds.
All this is me saying that I'm more inclined to blame software than to blame the hardware for UI lag.
- Aperocky 4y agoI've always used vim for text editing (and programming languages that do not use JVM), never had a problem with responsiveness regardless of computer spec.
- tstrimple 4y agoI'm going on record to suggest that people who have used computers from the 80's and 90's have rose tinted glasses on when remembering their experiences. Nostalgia is a bitch and lies to us all the time. Just loading a fucking program from a spinning disk hard drive adds a significant amount of startup time to programs that we've completely imagined away from the "golden age" of our computer usage. At this point I'm convinced it's just a natural extension of "they don't make it like they used to" which has plagued mankind for basically every generation ever which completely ignores survivor bias. I distinctly remember experiencing *major* performance gains when moving to more memory than my system and apps needed to use and the move to solid state drives. None of the "programmer's don't know how to code today" nonsense even comes close to eclipsing the performance gains from those two changes.
- foepys 4y agoBoth can be true at the same time. You can have a very slow program startup time but once it is up, it's very responsive to inputs.
- colordrops 4y agoBut you are forgetting that you used to be able to smell your computer.
- TheDong 4y agoPart of it is rose-tinted glasses, sure, but it's not entirely rose-tinted glasses. The "Living Computer Museum" in Seattle was (up until covid closed it) an excellent way to experience the past. I had this same insight and feeling then. The old machines, running their old operating system versions, felt responsive and crisp compared to performing similar tasks on modern machines with modern software equivalents.
- extropy 4y agoDOS programs loaded fast, since there was around 1MB of working memory. Granted they did not do much, but where responsive, except when needed to do real compute, then you just waited forever. Windows 3x/9x with first real multitasking and swap - things got quite sluggish. Early browsers were particularly eager of gulping ram and bringing everything to halt. Nowdays it feels somewhere in the middle with copious amounts of ram stuff can be fast once up and running, but it seems every app either wants to load from web on every step or tries to index your drive on every keypress.
- WalterBright 4y agoSome things were better, some things worse. For example, I hated the thousand pound CRT monitors and love my thin LED hi res. I also hated floppies. Squeek, squeek, grind, grind. The old hard drives were fine, though.
- everdrive 4y agoIt's just not monolithic. We've made serious improvements in a number of areas, but there are a few areas where we've clearly stepped backwards. Neither opinion really contradicts the other.
- Karunamon 4y agoSo it's funny you mention that. I own a couple of decidedly retro machines from the 90s, one runs DOS and the other runs Windows 98. These are used both for gaming and for productivity, both are equipped with solid-state drives as of late (I still have the original spinning rust.) Both of these machines are many times more responsive than any thing put out in the last decade despite being thousands of times less powerful. The applications they run are made to serve my needs as a user 1st. It gets out of my way. The user interface is clearly designed for the mouse and keyboard I am obviously using. It is made to help me accomplish tasks more efficiently rather than stroking some designer's ego or chasing some fad. Most of the software I use was released "done" rather than released half-baked with the hope of future updates. I don't have to worry about having my privacy invaded. It's not rose tinted glasses when I'm not wearing any and can look behind me and see the color. Modern mass-market technology is "worse is better" writ large.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoYes and no. I am now running an equivalent of a computer power that was once reserved for some dedicated government agency in early 90s[1]. I accept that some of that power is put to good use, but I do see wasted power in OS [2] and even games [3] on a semi-regular basis. For the record, "they don't make em' like they used to" is an absolutely valid complaint. Note that now even with SSD, ridiculous memory and cpu, websites still manage to stutter ( but I accept online is its own animal ). Part of me wants to go over Windows releases as an example of resource use across generations ( and how they leaped ). <<I distinctly remember experiencing major performance gains when moving to more memory than my system and apps needed to use and the move to solid state drives. But do you still see it or is that performance assumed now ( making lazy design decisions easier )? [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/kdr3p6/how_would_amds_latest_processors_compare_to_older https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/kdr3p6/how_would_amds_... [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg [3]https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/hacker-reduces-gta-online-load-times-by-over-70-percent/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/hacker-reduces-gta-on...
- aaronbrethorst 4y agoTry a text editor that isn’t built on top of Electron, perhaps.
- jchw 4y agoThat's kind of the point isn't it? Personally, I would be ecstatic to ditch VSCode for some super fast native code thingy, but the truth is that it's often just a better experience. The ecosystem is big, and the performance is not all bad news (the ripgrep-based search is pretty damn impressive, and beyond that, it feels like VSCode has less issues with performance cliffs in normal use cases that I've encountered than a lot of older editors, including KDE's Kwrite and GNOME's Gedit, but even other Electron editors like Atom, too. It's not perfect, but there are times when I left Kate to VSCode because opening some file made Kate way too unresponsive.)
- aaronbrethorst 4y agoI just moved from VSCode to RubyMine for my Rails work because I was finding the Ruby plug-in ecosystem for VSCode to be too flaky. Performance in both have been fine for me, despite being built in JS and Java. All that said, I really do miss TextMate.
- jchw 4y agoOK, I will give you one thing: I do love Jetbrains IDEs. That said, I don't use them for everything. They use a lot of RAM for me when loading large projects, and they feel a bit awkward outside of "traditional" project structures that work well with VS Code. I know Jetbrains is making a text editor, too. It does look very nice, but I have yet to try it. This all being said, Jetbrains IDEs do still feel less responsive than more native stuff like Kwrite or Notepad++. It can be forgiven of course, but I think it's a valid point to note down, especially given how often people bring up that article comparing latency of desktop computers over time.
- darkwater 4y ago> All that said, I really do miss TextMate. It's still there, no? https://macromates.com/ https://macromates.com/
- midoridensha 4y agoThe microcomputers I used in the 1980s, running on ~1MHz CPUs, were more responsive than everything that came after.
- Thorrez 4y agoHere's a table with the input lag and release date of various computers: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/ It seems like there might be a slight negative correlation (newer is worse). The data is fairly all over the place though.
- goodpoint 4y ago...until you start comparing lag and CPU performance. Then it becomes obvious what kind of bloated software the world is producing.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoAnd then you notice that recently there was an article pointing out that "software is IO-bound anyway" is no longer true, and this claim - for the first time since I remember - wasn't laughed out of the room. I await a more detailed study, but it seems quite likely the article was correct: IO is quite fast these days, and software is likely to be CPU-bound, particularly on parsing stuff as it's being read and operated on.
- tormeh 4y agoWasn't the limiting factor RAM latency? Anyway, yes, computers parse way too much JSON, SQL, and whatever else. I've recently started working with gRPC, and boy is it nice. The current paradigm where every action requires a text blob to be written, compressed, then sent to a server that decompresses it, parses it, acts on it, then creates a new text blob that is compressed and sent out... It's a bit much. And that's before ypu add load balancers and microservices. gRPC cuts down on the parsing and compressing bits, but it's still quite wasteful.
- thechao 4y agoI seem to remember that a good pencil has lag on the order of 1ms (how long it takes the tip to settle out after high speed motion), but I don't remember where this number came from, so it's untrustworthy. I always view the IBM selectric as "beyond the horizon" in terms of responsiveness: that's 25–30ms.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoIts whoever wins, forces his policies on the other department. If controlls team buys the cheapest hardware, the force the dev team to be competent economic wise, else the software team can hire jsunior and get away with it.
- WalterBright 4y agoThe text editor on my DOS machine would load instantly. It was also only 56K in size.
- criddell 4y agoEdlin was 2K and for a year or two was my main editor.
- WalterBright 4y agoI wasn't willing to go that far!
- laweijfmvo 4y agoIt still would, if you were willing to use a text editor in DOS.
- WalterBright 4y agoActually, the same editor recompiled for modern machines also loads instantly! https://github.com/DigitalMars/me https://github.com/DigitalMars/me
- onion2k 4y agoText editing on that 100Mhz computer felt responsive... Of course it did, because you were only editing the text. If you switch off syntax highlighting, linting, autocomplete, type checking, git integration, spell checking, grammar checking, and everything else your editor is doing then you can experience the joy of fast typing again. A 4GHz CPU is only 40 times faster than a 100MHz CPU (not that clock speed is the important bit here, but whatever), but you're asking it to do probably about 20,000 times more computation every time you press a key. And then you complain that it's too slow!
- TheDong 4y agoThere's not an option to switch various features off in many contexts. It is a requirement imposed upon me that I write documents in notion, and that text editor doesn't let me import locally written files since it doesn't have any lossless textual representation. I can't avoid the laggy text editor. It's a requirement that I use slack, and no combination of settings for the browser or desktop client seems to stop massive input lag. Typing into iOS or android's keyboard, in any text box, is an experience with very noticeable lag. I know that the computer is doing thousands of times more things than my older computer did, but I don't want it to do that stuff and there's no way to turn it off while still participating in modern society (i.e. using a cell phone and working at a company).
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y agoI don't know if you've tried this, and it might very well not be easier per se, but you can separate writing your text from the "typesetting" by composing in a barebones editor and then pasting that text into wherever you need to display the text. I don't know if something as barebones as notepad exists for phones, but the method I've described might make your experience better on a desktop.
- dmitriid 4y ago> but you're asking it to do probably about 20,000 times more computation every time you press a key. [citation needed]
- 4y ago
- BMc2020 4y agoA thousand times this. I die a thousand times a day waiting for software.
- scifibestfi 4y agoExactly. Hardware was fast enough in 1969 to put men on the moon. In 2022 we have laggy text editors. That's not a hardware problem.
- seized 4y agoBut that 1969 hardware did that one exact thing and nothing but. No networking, no displays beyond some digits, etc. It was a calculator. No one's calculator is running that large text editor, 20 Chrome tabs, Teams/Slack, Spotify... Yeah, nothing should lag these days but it's not really a valid comparison between today and the Apollo computer.
- jameshart 4y ago100MHz, so to be clear, we're talking about like an early Pentium. 1995ish. So that 100MHz computer had maybe 8 or 16MB of RAM - it was struggling to run anything other than the text editor you were using - no, you aren't running an MP3 player in the background, winamp has not been released yet; no you are not running your email client in the background, you're on a 28.8K dialup modem and you are not hanging on the line on the offchance that mail arrives - you are dialing up, waiting 30 seconds for the modem to handshake, then watching your emails trickle in at a rate of one every few seconds. The machine took noticeable time to seek and load or save to the hard disk, so it made up for that by trying to keep everything in RAM all the time, with the downside that if it crashed (and it frequently crashed) you would lose all your work since you last hit save. So yes, the cursor responded right away when you pressed a key. But other than that, golden days, those were not.