7 ms·

I hold out forlorn hope that someday my modern workstation will achieve the responsiveness and fast boot times of my Commodore 128. Not joking in the least.

anikom15 4y ago
Not a C64 user, but I did use Apples, Ataris, and IBMs. Booting to BASIC or a cartridge was fast. Booting to a floppy not as much. Reading a tape? That took several minutes.
- dijit 4y ago
  The boot was fast on the c64. Essentially instant. It just dumped you into a prompt though, and loading any program was really quite painfully slow.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    It could be just as fast if the bios on a PC did absolutely nothing other than initialize the motherboard and a small basic interpreter. A modern bios goes through more cycles during the boot phase of a typical machine than a C64 would see in its entire lifetime.
    - anikom15 4y ago
      It will be faster actually.
    - NikkiA 4y ago
      On early IBM PCs (up until around the introduction of the PS/2 anyway) there was a key sequence to boot direct to BASICA, and it was always about as fast as the 8bits were - except that most of the 8bits didn't have the slow memory check that IBM insisted on.
logicallee 4y ago
I have a long break over the holiday and am thinking of putting a software project out. Do you think I should consider making it a priority to code in a fairly low-level programming language (e.g. Rust) without overhead, and count cycles so that most tasks are done within a single screen refresh? I can't make the rest of users' systems more responsive but I could make my own software as fast and efficient as possible. The other alternatives are Python, which would make it easier to ship large features but would come with a large overhead (full interpreter) since it's an interpreted language.
- shadowofneptune 4y ago
  Cycle-counting is useless on modern workstations, since different processor are used in each. I don't see how the choice of language is significant either, as long as it meets your goals for responsiveness. Goal could be instead to limit latency where possible (measuring time from click to completed action is easy with a framework), or communicate to the user when an action will take a noticable amount of time.
  - szundi 4y ago
    Agreed. The 2 choke points you optimize in algo returns the loss on choosing an otherwise better lang/environment for productivity. Sometimes not though, like startup times, but there is not so many use cases that this counts, like 1password starts slower with each release.
- AlexanderDhoore 4y ago
  I'd do it in C, but that's just me. If this is a one-person project you can hold you code to a high standard. Clean standard C11 with all warnings turned on (-Wall Wextra Wpendantic Wconversion). Write unit tests. Run them with valgrand/sanitizers. Use clang-format. Build with multiple compilers (GCC/clang/MSVC). ... EDIT Not many hackers on hackernews apparently.
  - ratorx 4y ago
    I’m curious as to the upside of C, is it mostly just a familiarity thing? Holding your own code to a high standard is great, but wouldn’t it be nicer if you could offload more of that into the tooling and spend more time on the problem or making the code even cleaner? Also as a side note: I always find it funny that a flag that represents all warnings doesn’t actually turn on all warnings.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Can still be done if all you want is a command-line to come up and be responsive. Most folks want web, email, images, and even a bit of security from their computer today. Could always be faster, but I think the days of "bam!" ready are past due to those requirements. Unless the computer is only sleeping, like an iphone for example.
- ianlevesque 4y ago
  Those things don't preclude responsiveness though. Modern software is sitting on top of mountains of inefficiencies and legacy baggage. This was found just months ago https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/20-year-old-linux-workaround-is-still-slowing-down-amd-systems/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/20-year-old-linux-wo... "A bit of security" is also quite apt, since there's huge room for improvement there too. I wish I could find a way to get paid to improve all this. Currently I'm only doing it for mobile apps.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
  web, email, images and a bit of security are not the reason windows UI is laggy as fuck
  - idonotknowwhy 4y ago
    I agree. Around 2008 when I got my first SSD installed, windows 7 and PCLinuxOS2007 would open apps like Word instantly. You'd click and it'd be there within 100ms. Now with windows 10 on a much faster pc, clicking apps like Firefox, the start menu, word take seconds to load. I recently fired up my windows 7 VM to mod an old game console and it was exactly how I remembered. You click something and it's instantly opened.
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Thankfully, you are welcome to use something else that puts your needs before that of big brother(s).
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  >Most folks want web, email, images, and even a bit of security from their computer today. Could always be faster, but I think the days of "bam!" ready are past due to those requirements. Unless the computer is only sleeping, like an iphone for example. Sure, but a modern computer also has orders of magnitude more processing power than devices that only ran a command line. There is no reason that we cant have both, except incompetence and/or bad economic incentives.
phaedrus 4y ago
I worked with a brilliant engineer who had previously worked at one of the major hard drive manufacturers. He told me about a project he'd worked where the disk manufacturer had their firmware writers collaborate with low-level OS programmers to significantly speed up modern PC boot times. The conclusion was yes they could technically do it, but they found so many peripherals and device drivers that relied on the boot being slow (either intentionally or unintentionally - e.g. hardware or software race conditions, device drivers not actually making sure the device is ready yet, etc.) that there was "no point."
- kabdib 4y ago
  I've seen code that (a) issued an async read (b) did some computation (c) used the buffer filled in by that async read ... without actually seeing if the read completed. Hilarity ensued when the CPU got faster. This was in stuff that shipped to hundreds of thousands of customers. If you're having a good day, you can definitely address that problem by reading device drivers for a few hours.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    It seems like this would be classic Apple territory, to one up their competitors via their unique vertically integrated position.
    - wil421 4y ago
      Yes it is. I’ve heard from Hackintosh Overclocker types that Apples ACPI[1] tables are the best and most of the PC motherboard manufacturers are compete garbage. Including WTF how does this hardware even function moments. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI
      - xmodem 4y ago
        I assume things are better these days, but back in 2005 the thing that lead me to switch to mac was seeing a friend with a powerbook which had a sleep mode that actually worked.
nemacol 4y ago
I feel the same way about TV. I miss the ability to quickly flip through channels. When I was younger and my family had our first internet connection my dad said "One day internet webpages will load like changing channels on the TV - click click click. instant page loads" Today TV soo much slower and webpage are... well... you know.
- ant6n 4y ago
  So the prediction came true - webpages and tv channels load at the same speed.
  - throwaway742 4y ago
    Monkey's paw curls.
- MayeulC 4y ago
  I played around with the `dillo` web browser a couple years ago. It doesn't support javascript, but it was oh so amazing to experience it as you describe.
  - officeplant 4y ago
    I still love using Dillo or w3m to browse a simpler web at times.
    - doublepg23 4y ago
      Not sure if you’re familiar (it’s made the rounds a few times) but the Gemini Protocol (HTTPS replacement) and corresponding Gemtext format (Basically Markdown not even HTML really) is very cool internet space. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
neurostimulant 4y ago
Every parts of modern computer system introduce unavoidable latency: monitor has ~50ms latency, bluetooth keyboard has ~70ms latency. Even the desktop compositor has latency (~10ms). Then you have another latency in the application layer, typically the slow text rendering stacks like GDI or Cairo (~50ms). It's basically impossible to escape them in a modern system these days.

anikom15 4y ago

Not a C64 user, but I did use Apples, Ataris, and IBMs. Booting to BASIC or a cartridge was fast. Booting to a floppy not as much. Reading a tape? That took several minutes.

dijit 4y ago
The boot was fast on the c64. Essentially instant. It just dumped you into a prompt though, and loading any program was really quite painfully slow.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  It could be just as fast if the bios on a PC did absolutely nothing other than initialize the motherboard and a small basic interpreter. A modern bios goes through more cycles during the boot phase of a typical machine than a C64 would see in its entire lifetime.
  - anikom15 4y ago
    It will be faster actually.
  - NikkiA 4y ago
    On early IBM PCs (up until around the introduction of the PS/2 anyway) there was a key sequence to boot direct to BASICA, and it was always about as fast as the 8bits were - except that most of the 8bits didn't have the slow memory check that IBM insisted on.

logicallee 4y ago

I have a long break over the holiday and am thinking of putting a software project out. Do you think I should consider making it a priority to code in a fairly low-level programming language (e.g. Rust) without overhead, and count cycles so that most tasks are done within a single screen refresh? I can't make the rest of users' systems more responsive but I could make my own software as fast and efficient as possible. The other alternatives are Python, which would make it easier to ship large features but would come with a large overhead (full interpreter) since it's an interpreted language.

shadowofneptune 4y ago
Cycle-counting is useless on modern workstations, since different processor are used in each. I don't see how the choice of language is significant either, as long as it meets your goals for responsiveness. Goal could be instead to limit latency where possible (measuring time from click to completed action is easy with a framework), or communicate to the user when an action will take a noticable amount of time.
- szundi 4y ago
  Agreed. The 2 choke points you optimize in algo returns the loss on choosing an otherwise better lang/environment for productivity. Sometimes not though, like startup times, but there is not so many use cases that this counts, like 1password starts slower with each release.
AlexanderDhoore 4y ago
I'd do it in C, but that's just me. If this is a one-person project you can hold you code to a high standard. Clean standard C11 with all warnings turned on (-Wall Wextra Wpendantic Wconversion). Write unit tests. Run them with valgrand/sanitizers. Use clang-format. Build with multiple compilers (GCC/clang/MSVC). ... EDIT Not many hackers on hackernews apparently.
- ratorx 4y ago
  I’m curious as to the upside of C, is it mostly just a familiarity thing? Holding your own code to a high standard is great, but wouldn’t it be nicer if you could offload more of that into the tooling and spend more time on the problem or making the code even cleaner? Also as a side note: I always find it funny that a flag that represents all warnings doesn’t actually turn on all warnings.

mixmastamyk 4y ago

Can still be done if all you want is a command-line to come up and be responsive. Most folks want web, email, images, and even a bit of security from their computer today. Could always be faster, but I think the days of "bam!" ready are past due to those requirements. Unless the computer is only sleeping, like an iphone for example.

ianlevesque 4y ago
Those things don't preclude responsiveness though. Modern software is sitting on top of mountains of inefficiencies and legacy baggage. This was found just months ago https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/20-year-old-linux-workaround-is-still-slowing-down-amd-systems/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/20-year-old-linux-wo... "A bit of security" is also quite apt, since there's huge room for improvement there too. I wish I could find a way to get paid to improve all this. Currently I'm only doing it for mobile apps.
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
web, email, images and a bit of security are not the reason windows UI is laggy as fuck
- idonotknowwhy 4y ago
  I agree. Around 2008 when I got my first SSD installed, windows 7 and PCLinuxOS2007 would open apps like Word instantly. You'd click and it'd be there within 100ms. Now with windows 10 on a much faster pc, clicking apps like Firefox, the start menu, word take seconds to load. I recently fired up my windows 7 VM to mod an old game console and it was exactly how I remembered. You click something and it's instantly opened.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Thankfully, you are welcome to use something else that puts your needs before that of big brother(s).
_Algernon_ 4y ago
>Most folks want web, email, images, and even a bit of security from their computer today. Could always be faster, but I think the days of "bam!" ready are past due to those requirements. Unless the computer is only sleeping, like an iphone for example. Sure, but a modern computer also has orders of magnitude more processing power than devices that only ran a command line. There is no reason that we cant have both, except incompetence and/or bad economic incentives.

phaedrus 4y ago

I worked with a brilliant engineer who had previously worked at one of the major hard drive manufacturers. He told me about a project he'd worked where the disk manufacturer had their firmware writers collaborate with low-level OS programmers to significantly speed up modern PC boot times. The conclusion was yes they could technically do it, but they found so many peripherals and device drivers that relied on the boot being slow (either intentionally or unintentionally - e.g. hardware or software race conditions, device drivers not actually making sure the device is ready yet, etc.) that there was "no point."

kabdib 4y ago
I've seen code that (a) issued an async read (b) did some computation (c) used the buffer filled in by that async read ... without actually seeing if the read completed. Hilarity ensued when the CPU got faster. This was in stuff that shipped to hundreds of thousands of customers. If you're having a good day, you can definitely address that problem by reading device drivers for a few hours.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  It seems like this would be classic Apple territory, to one up their competitors via their unique vertically integrated position.
  - wil421 4y ago
    Yes it is. I’ve heard from Hackintosh Overclocker types that Apples ACPI[1] tables are the best and most of the PC motherboard manufacturers are compete garbage. Including WTF how does this hardware even function moments. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI
    - xmodem 4y ago
      I assume things are better these days, but back in 2005 the thing that lead me to switch to mac was seeing a friend with a powerbook which had a sleep mode that actually worked.

nemacol 4y ago

I feel the same way about TV. I miss the ability to quickly flip through channels. When I was younger and my family had our first internet connection my dad said "One day internet webpages will load like changing channels on the TV - click click click. instant page loads" Today TV soo much slower and webpage are... well... you know.

ant6n 4y ago
So the prediction came true - webpages and tv channels load at the same speed.
- throwaway742 4y ago
  Monkey's paw curls.
MayeulC 4y ago
I played around with the `dillo` web browser a couple years ago. It doesn't support javascript, but it was oh so amazing to experience it as you describe.
- officeplant 4y ago
  I still love using Dillo or w3m to browse a simpler web at times.
  - doublepg23 4y ago
    Not sure if you’re familiar (it’s made the rounds a few times) but the Gemini Protocol (HTTPS replacement) and corresponding Gemtext format (Basically Markdown not even HTML really) is very cool internet space. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

neurostimulant 4y ago

Every parts of modern computer system introduce unavoidable latency: monitor has ~50ms latency, bluetooth keyboard has ~70ms latency. Even the desktop compositor has latency (~10ms). Then you have another latency in the application layer, typically the slow text rendering stacks like GDI or Cairo (~50ms). It's basically impossible to escape them in a modern system these days.