Their programs interact with different APIs and constraints on many different sets of hardware. 5 different major hardware targets, 8 operating systems, and hun

Their programs interact with different APIs and constraints on many different sets of hardware. 5 different major hardware targets, 8 operating systems, and hundreds of versions of driver software. It’s hard to do all that well and keep things validated to continue running with minimal ability to update and support it. Web programs barely work on two browsers. Server targets are generally reduced to a single target (Docker or a specific distribution of Linux). Their tiny data is rendering millions of polygons with real-time lighting, asset loading in the background, low latency input handling, etc. at 60fps+. If my API responds to the user in 100ms, they’re ecstatic. If their game responds to the user in 100ms (5-10 dropped frames) even a few times, they’re likely to ask for a refund or write a bad review, hurting sales. The constraints are different, but game programmers do the same kinds of optimization social networks do, just for different problems. They avoid doing the N^2 version of lighting, path finding, physics simulations, etc. Social networks avoid it when searching through their graphs. I think the web and other big tech companies should try thinking about problems the way game programmers do.