7 ms·

For the first year or so, the experience of using these 3nm machines will be unparalleled. Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will

For the first year or so, the experience of using these 3nm machines will be unparalleled. Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs. Paraphrasing the old saying: "What TSMC giveth, Electron taketh"

ChrisRR 4y ago
As an embedded developer I'm always surprised that physicists and engineers spend decades pushing the limits of physics, for software devs to come along and make text editors no faster than they were on Windows 3.1
- meindnoch 4y ago
  >no faster In terms of latency it's usually slower by an order of magnitude. There should be a law that mandates developers to use at least two generations older hardware than the average consumer.
  - ticviking 4y ago
    Doing development work on a 10 year old ThinkPad dramatically changed how I think about performance in my software. With a tiny bit of attention to performance you can do insane things
  - totetsu 4y ago
    I want my ps2 keyboard port back
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      USB doesn't have to be this slow. Some slowness is required, but not this much. (And USB3 doesn't have to be slower than PS2.) What we get is a result of nobody on the entire stack giving a shit. It's not a technological limitation.
    - toast0 4y ago
      ps2 keyboard/mouse support is still there on modern x86; but you have to carefully shop for motherboards. And if you also want a ps2 mouse, you'll probably need a splitter, 2x ps2 ports on a single board seems to be no longer available.
- neatze 4y ago
  Why it is so surprising, when delivery of product/solution in most cases prioritized over quality/efficiency to very large degree, eg. good enough delivery in 3 month is more profitable, then perfect product in year or so.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- papruapap 4y ago
  Can we stop the hyperboling? The amount of multitasking we can do on consumer computers today is nowhere close what is what possible only 10 years ago. About text editors... you can use blazing fast editors if you want like cli-base ones, notepad++ or sublimetext... If devs are not using those to code anymore there may be reasons, right?
  - pietroq 4y ago
    Fun fact: Turbo Pascal was 38KB and that included the editor, compiler and debugger. It was lightning fast, compiling 10s of kSLOC in mere seconds on a 4.77MHz single-thread 8088 with 640KB of RAM. Now to build a Hello World full stack web app it can take 10+ minutes on a modern PC with 4GHz 16 core CPU and 64GB of RAM :)
    - andreigheorghe 4y ago
      cool story, now try writing a "Hello World full stack web app" in turbo pascal.
      - yborg 4y ago
        And another Youtube video is born...
      - tokinonagare 4y ago
        It's actually quite easy if you can find a networking library: bind and listen on a socket on port 80, read text until you get GET / HTTP/1.1, discard whatever comes after, write back a response containing "Hello World" in the correct format (few lines of text) and that's it! A new full stack web app is born.
    - shepherdjerred 4y ago
      > Now to build a Hello World full stack web app it can take 10+ minutes on a modern PC with 4GHz 16 core CPU and 64GB of RAM :) That's a bit of an exaggeration. What stack's hello world takes 10 minutes to build?
dangus 4y ago
I wonder if there's a baseline for cynical comments about application performance? Because it sure seems like this exact comment is a tinnitus-like constant ringing noise amongst the tech community.
- brundolf 4y ago
  It's really just HN
rcarr 4y ago
The rust community seem to be leading the fightback on this but I think it'll be about 5 years before there's a big switch over. If I owned a popular electron app, I would definitely be thinking about starting to write a Rust version or migrating to Tauri because if you're not then somebody will be. Once that Rust version hits feature parity with your core functionality people will end up jumping ship for the faster, shinier version, just like people jumped ship from Atom to VSCode. Big Electron hitters like the aforementioned VSCode seem to be banking on people switching over to cloud which I'm not sure I see the majority doing. I find the UX of using VSCode in the browser not that great. I'm already in the minority because I do all my work in Sublime Text so I might be completely wrong about all this, but this is how I suspect it will play out.
- circuit10 4y ago
  I don’t see why Tauri would necessarily be faster, from what I understand the main difference is that it uses a browser bundled with OS where possible but that’s not necessarily a faster browser than Chromium
  - rcarr 4y ago
    https://tauri.app/v1/references/benchmarks/ https://tauri.app/v1/references/benchmarks/ I will admit there doesn't seem to be as much in it as I thought there was.
- LeanderK 4y ago
  I find VSCode to be responsive and snappy and I am on older hardware (Mid 2014 macbook pro). I don't go overboard with thousands of extensions though, but I like the flexibility and use a few "more heavy" extensions like the jupyter extension. I have to say I am very satisfied by my editor and I can not really understand the VSCode hate. But I only use python and no demanding software like docker.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > If I owned a popular electron app, I would definitely be thinking about starting to write a Rust version or migrating to Tauri because if you're not then somebody will be. Once that Rust version hits feature parity with your core functionality people will end up jumping ship for the faster, shinier version, just like people jumped ship from Atom to VSCode. Sublime Text was always faster than all of these (and still is) but that’s not why people are picking text editors. Tauri is great for certain use cases but it’s not even close to a replacement for Electron at this point (having used both). Optimizing for speed above all else is the kind of thing that appeals to a subset of programmers, but most people just don’t care about at all as long as it’s fast enough. Products like VSCode are more than fast enough for all but a few people who like to count milliseconds.
LeanderK 4y ago
I use a mid 2014 MacBook pro. I spend my days in vscode, a terminal and safari. So far it's still going strong. It's sometimes laggy, of course, and the battery life is really bad, but in general it's still a machine that can be worked with.
- rcarr 4y ago
  Last November, I went from a Late 2013 MacBook Pro to an M1 MacBook Pro and it's phenomenal. Sure, I could get by on the Late 2013 but everything is so much better on the new one, I would hate to go back. I can easily code for an entire day now without having to worry about charging, makes a massive difference if you work outside the house a lot. I'm even thinking of upgrading again whenever these M3s come out because the performance and energy efficiency increases sound nuts. My advice would be to upgrade whenever you can. Even just 'little' things like being able to highlight and copy text out of photos and screenshots make it a vastly better experience.
  - LeanderK 4y ago
    I would love to upgrade, the short battery life is just really immensely frustrating because I need my laptop a lot outside the house too. And it is often slow, especially with too many tabs open. But it's way too much money for me right now. My comment was more a reply to: > Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs which I felt can't be true because my laptop is ancient by modern standards but still usable. Not as snappy as I would like it to be, but also not terrible or unusable.
skybrian 4y ago
This doesn’t make sense. VS Code works fine on a 2010 iMac that’s so old that Apple doesn’t support the OS anymore. I’m starting to see less software support, though. I should put Linux on it.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs. This is one of those HN comments that has me feeling like I live in a different world than the commenter. What Electron apps are you using that are really that slow? I use several of the popular Electron and CEF apps on a daily basis and everything is fast. The exceptions are anything that loads over a network. Spotify, Slack, and others can feel “slow” when the content is loading from a backend over the internet, but obviously that’s not the fault of the UI
- ticviking 4y ago
  When was the last time you used them on a $200 laptop like your cousin picked up cheap to take to college? Or tried to help students use an electron IDE on a computer with 8Gb and a 2 ghz 10 year old processor that their dad saved to buy secondhand to help his kid not need to work overtime at the factory to keep food on the table? Electon is only fast on developer and gamer tier hardware. Try running this stuff on the hardware steam says is the average gamer and see how fast it actually feels.
  - ihateolives 4y ago
    Having used second hand laptops almost exclusively for 20 years and having helped friends to do the same I'm pretty confident saying that 90% of the time the slowness is botched Windows installation and the lack of computer hygiene. Not always, but in overwhelmingly majority of cases.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Do you reboot every day?
- nemetroid 4y ago
  When i switch back and forth between two channels in Slack, it takes a noticeable amount of time. I’d say 300-400 ms or so. Is it significantly faster for you, or do you consider that to be fast?
- 4y ago
andrei_says_ 4y ago
I know this is a joke but I’ve heard many variations and - how does Electron taketh? Is the codebase getting de-optimized with time? Is it badly architectures extensions? Is the JS runtime becoming slower?
- fennecfoxy 4y ago
  I think it's proliferation as well. If I look at what I'm using day to day: VSCode, Postman, Slack, Teams, Spotify are usually all open; they're all Electron. People definitely don't optimise their Electron apps as well as they could for time reasons, normally not too bad if you're running 1 Electron app, but if you're running several then it becomes more obvious. Tbh it's a old/new software design principle I guess. We all hear the stories of some 386 machine in the basement running some fortran program that hasn't been touched in years; whereas modern JS-based codebases are expected to be constantly updated. I've worked in JS my whole career & it's very rare to see a project that's one & done like software used to be. Maybe old software did get updated, but in long release cycles, version 1, 1.1 etc. Now JS-based software is updated (sometimes) every day!
hajile 4y ago
I think TSMC N3 will be underwhelming. It offers a shrink of logic transistors, but ZERO shrink to SRAM meaning one of Apple's biggest advantages (massive caches) isn't going to have much room to improve.

ChrisRR 4y ago

As an embedded developer I'm always surprised that physicists and engineers spend decades pushing the limits of physics, for software devs to come along and make text editors no faster than they were on Windows 3.1

meindnoch 4y ago
>no faster In terms of latency it's usually slower by an order of magnitude. There should be a law that mandates developers to use at least two generations older hardware than the average consumer.
- ticviking 4y ago
  Doing development work on a 10 year old ThinkPad dramatically changed how I think about performance in my software. With a tiny bit of attention to performance you can do insane things
- totetsu 4y ago
  I want my ps2 keyboard port back
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    USB doesn't have to be this slow. Some slowness is required, but not this much. (And USB3 doesn't have to be slower than PS2.) What we get is a result of nobody on the entire stack giving a shit. It's not a technological limitation.
  - toast0 4y ago
    ps2 keyboard/mouse support is still there on modern x86; but you have to carefully shop for motherboards. And if you also want a ps2 mouse, you'll probably need a splitter, 2x ps2 ports on a single board seems to be no longer available.
neatze 4y ago
Why it is so surprising, when delivery of product/solution in most cases prioritized over quality/efficiency to very large degree, eg. good enough delivery in 3 month is more profitable, then perfect product in year or so.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
papruapap 4y ago
Can we stop the hyperboling? The amount of multitasking we can do on consumer computers today is nowhere close what is what possible only 10 years ago. About text editors... you can use blazing fast editors if you want like cli-base ones, notepad++ or sublimetext... If devs are not using those to code anymore there may be reasons, right?
- pietroq 4y ago
  Fun fact: Turbo Pascal was 38KB and that included the editor, compiler and debugger. It was lightning fast, compiling 10s of kSLOC in mere seconds on a 4.77MHz single-thread 8088 with 640KB of RAM. Now to build a Hello World full stack web app it can take 10+ minutes on a modern PC with 4GHz 16 core CPU and 64GB of RAM :)
  - andreigheorghe 4y ago
    cool story, now try writing a "Hello World full stack web app" in turbo pascal.
    - yborg 4y ago
      And another Youtube video is born...
    - tokinonagare 4y ago
      It's actually quite easy if you can find a networking library: bind and listen on a socket on port 80, read text until you get GET / HTTP/1.1, discard whatever comes after, write back a response containing "Hello World" in the correct format (few lines of text) and that's it! A new full stack web app is born.
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    > Now to build a Hello World full stack web app it can take 10+ minutes on a modern PC with 4GHz 16 core CPU and 64GB of RAM :) That's a bit of an exaggeration. What stack's hello world takes 10 minutes to build?

dangus 4y ago

I wonder if there's a baseline for cynical comments about application performance? Because it sure seems like this exact comment is a tinnitus-like constant ringing noise amongst the tech community.

brundolf 4y ago
It's really just HN

rcarr 4y ago

The rust community seem to be leading the fightback on this but I think it'll be about 5 years before there's a big switch over. If I owned a popular electron app, I would definitely be thinking about starting to write a Rust version or migrating to Tauri because if you're not then somebody will be. Once that Rust version hits feature parity with your core functionality people will end up jumping ship for the faster, shinier version, just like people jumped ship from Atom to VSCode. Big Electron hitters like the aforementioned VSCode seem to be banking on people switching over to cloud which I'm not sure I see the majority doing. I find the UX of using VSCode in the browser not that great. I'm already in the minority because I do all my work in Sublime Text so I might be completely wrong about all this, but this is how I suspect it will play out.

circuit10 4y ago
I don’t see why Tauri would necessarily be faster, from what I understand the main difference is that it uses a browser bundled with OS where possible but that’s not necessarily a faster browser than Chromium
- rcarr 4y ago
  https://tauri.app/v1/references/benchmarks/ https://tauri.app/v1/references/benchmarks/ I will admit there doesn't seem to be as much in it as I thought there was.
LeanderK 4y ago
I find VSCode to be responsive and snappy and I am on older hardware (Mid 2014 macbook pro). I don't go overboard with thousands of extensions though, but I like the flexibility and use a few "more heavy" extensions like the jupyter extension. I have to say I am very satisfied by my editor and I can not really understand the VSCode hate. But I only use python and no demanding software like docker.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> If I owned a popular electron app, I would definitely be thinking about starting to write a Rust version or migrating to Tauri because if you're not then somebody will be. Once that Rust version hits feature parity with your core functionality people will end up jumping ship for the faster, shinier version, just like people jumped ship from Atom to VSCode. Sublime Text was always faster than all of these (and still is) but that’s not why people are picking text editors. Tauri is great for certain use cases but it’s not even close to a replacement for Electron at this point (having used both). Optimizing for speed above all else is the kind of thing that appeals to a subset of programmers, but most people just don’t care about at all as long as it’s fast enough. Products like VSCode are more than fast enough for all but a few people who like to count milliseconds.

LeanderK 4y ago

I use a mid 2014 MacBook pro. I spend my days in vscode, a terminal and safari. So far it's still going strong. It's sometimes laggy, of course, and the battery life is really bad, but in general it's still a machine that can be worked with.

rcarr 4y ago
Last November, I went from a Late 2013 MacBook Pro to an M1 MacBook Pro and it's phenomenal. Sure, I could get by on the Late 2013 but everything is so much better on the new one, I would hate to go back. I can easily code for an entire day now without having to worry about charging, makes a massive difference if you work outside the house a lot. I'm even thinking of upgrading again whenever these M3s come out because the performance and energy efficiency increases sound nuts. My advice would be to upgrade whenever you can. Even just 'little' things like being able to highlight and copy text out of photos and screenshots make it a vastly better experience.
- LeanderK 4y ago
  I would love to upgrade, the short battery life is just really immensely frustrating because I need my laptop a lot outside the house too. And it is often slow, especially with too many tabs open. But it's way too much money for me right now. My comment was more a reply to: > Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs which I felt can't be true because my laptop is ancient by modern standards but still usable. Not as snappy as I would like it to be, but also not terrible or unusable.

skybrian 4y ago

This doesn’t make sense. VS Code works fine on a 2010 iMac that’s so old that Apple doesn’t support the OS anymore. I’m starting to see less software support, though. I should put Linux on it.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs. This is one of those HN comments that has me feeling like I live in a different world than the commenter. What Electron apps are you using that are really that slow? I use several of the popular Electron and CEF apps on a daily basis and everything is fast. The exceptions are anything that loads over a network. Spotify, Slack, and others can feel “slow” when the content is loading from a backend over the internet, but obviously that’s not the fault of the UI

ticviking 4y ago
When was the last time you used them on a $200 laptop like your cousin picked up cheap to take to college? Or tried to help students use an electron IDE on a computer with 8Gb and a 2 ghz 10 year old processor that their dad saved to buy secondhand to help his kid not need to work overtime at the factory to keep food on the table? Electon is only fast on developer and gamer tier hardware. Try running this stuff on the hardware steam says is the average gamer and see how fast it actually feels.
- ihateolives 4y ago
  Having used second hand laptops almost exclusively for 20 years and having helped friends to do the same I'm pretty confident saying that 90% of the time the slowness is botched Windows installation and the lack of computer hygiene. Not always, but in overwhelmingly majority of cases.
mrguyorama 4y ago
Do you reboot every day?
nemetroid 4y ago
When i switch back and forth between two channels in Slack, it takes a noticeable amount of time. I’d say 300-400 ms or so. Is it significantly faster for you, or do you consider that to be fast?
4y ago

andrei_says_ 4y ago

I know this is a joke but I’ve heard many variations and - how does Electron taketh? Is the codebase getting de-optimized with time? Is it badly architectures extensions? Is the JS runtime becoming slower?

fennecfoxy 4y ago
I think it's proliferation as well. If I look at what I'm using day to day: VSCode, Postman, Slack, Teams, Spotify are usually all open; they're all Electron. People definitely don't optimise their Electron apps as well as they could for time reasons, normally not too bad if you're running 1 Electron app, but if you're running several then it becomes more obvious. Tbh it's a old/new software design principle I guess. We all hear the stories of some 386 machine in the basement running some fortran program that hasn't been touched in years; whereas modern JS-based codebases are expected to be constantly updated. I've worked in JS my whole career & it's very rare to see a project that's one & done like software used to be. Maybe old software did get updated, but in long release cycles, version 1, 1.1 etc. Now JS-based software is updated (sometimes) every day!

hajile 4y ago

I think TSMC N3 will be underwhelming. It offers a shrink of logic transistors, but ZERO shrink to SRAM meaning one of Apple's biggest advantages (massive caches) isn't going to have much room to improve.