4 ms·

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 t

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?
  - grogenaut 4y ago
    depending on your network, `npx create-react-app --template typescript` might take 10-15 minutes easily.
    - shepherdjerred 4y ago
      Well, yes, given an infinitely slow network any action depending on the network can take an infinite amount of time. Since the discussion is around CPU hardware improvements, I don't think network speeds are too relevant.
      - grogenaut 4y ago
        but isn't it? We've moved a ton of the compute to using the network and I think that makes things a lot slower than they need to be... and a lot less optimized. And along with that, since we have essentially infinite storage we havne't gotten good at trimming the fat... this is yet another thing that steals from our compute.
- PragmaticPulp 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 :) You’re doing something extremely wrong if this is the case. Or more likely, the people complaining about “10 minute” web app compile times are just repeating hyperbole they found in other cynical comments.
- prophesi 4y ago
  Compiling a web app takes seconds as well. The common complaint is the resources needed to run the app as a consumer, particularly when most of the apps you use are all instances of chromium.
user3939382 4y ago
In many cases developer resources are more expensive than hardware or network resources and the decreased efficiency of modern software reflects that. We can all agree software is not as resource efficient as it used to be on the whole. Beyond that we’d have to discuss specific examples and benchmarks.
- cosmojg 4y ago
  I'm simultaneously grateful that we value developer time and wellbeing over software performance and appalled that we too often forget the relationship between software performance and developer time and wellbeing.
  - a_wild_dandan 4y ago
    I almost exclusively use "glutenous" apps (browser, VSCode, Spotify, Discord, etc.) and have yet to experience these Electron performance issues decried in HN comment crusades. Everything is perfectly snappy. Ditto for my acquaintances. The ROI on these optimizations likely wouldn't matter for the overwhelming majority of folk. I could be wrong. I often am. But I suspect that Electron consumes far more resources in the minds of HN users than it does in most computers.
    - Strom 4y ago
      It's possible you and your acquaintances can't tell. Similarly some people claim they can't tell a difference between a 720p video and higher. Or that they can't tell a difference between 128 kbps CBR MP3 and higher. However the differences are real and have been measured. [1] [2] You are welcome to argue that the performance work isn't worth prioritizing, but don't fall into the trap of claiming the performance gap doesn't exist. -- [1] https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ [2] https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
mrguyorama 4y ago
My 2006 Vista machine, with two cores at 2.6ghz quite simply multitasked better than my current ryzen 5 3600 based machine. The one simple reason why is that all the programs I ran on that machine were native, while all the apps we run nowadays are blobs of javascript in a dumb chrome window. Eclipse ran better on my $600 laptop in 2012 than pycharm runs on my 6 core 2019 macbook. Also, on my macbook, high cpu activity causes constant pops in my audio, which is just a thing that happens with macbooks that people just ignore apparently.
- redsaz 4y ago
  My recollection of Vista was that everybody was complaining of its performance compared to XP because so much switched to .net-based apps, slogging everything down. It wasn't until Win7 that everybody was happy (it could even run on netbooks).
jiggawatts 4y ago
The new Notepad on Windows struggles to open files just a few hundred MB in size and visibly stutters and freezes when doing not much on a high end gaming PC. It is apparently an iron law of the Universe that all available computing power must be wasted.
- fennecfoxy 4y ago
  I'd say that's _because_ it's an old app that hasn't been rewritten ground up to take advantage of modern hardware resources.
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    I'm talking about the NEW Notepad, which has been rewritten from the ground up to waste modern hardware resources.
LeBit 4y ago
Typing in Obsidian is often excruciatingly slow. It is an electron app. Typing in Sublime Text is always fast. Except for the first line which is the title of the tab. After that, it is fast. I often switch to ST to type, then copy and paste to the slow app. It's kinda nuts.

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?
- grogenaut 4y ago
  depending on your network, `npx create-react-app --template typescript` might take 10-15 minutes easily.
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    Well, yes, given an infinitely slow network any action depending on the network can take an infinite amount of time. Since the discussion is around CPU hardware improvements, I don't think network speeds are too relevant.
    - grogenaut 4y ago
      but isn't it? We've moved a ton of the compute to using the network and I think that makes things a lot slower than they need to be... and a lot less optimized. And along with that, since we have essentially infinite storage we havne't gotten good at trimming the fat... this is yet another thing that steals from our compute.
PragmaticPulp 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 :) You’re doing something extremely wrong if this is the case. Or more likely, the people complaining about “10 minute” web app compile times are just repeating hyperbole they found in other cynical comments.
prophesi 4y ago
Compiling a web app takes seconds as well. The common complaint is the resources needed to run the app as a consumer, particularly when most of the apps you use are all instances of chromium.

user3939382 4y ago

In many cases developer resources are more expensive than hardware or network resources and the decreased efficiency of modern software reflects that. We can all agree software is not as resource efficient as it used to be on the whole. Beyond that we’d have to discuss specific examples and benchmarks.

cosmojg 4y ago
I'm simultaneously grateful that we value developer time and wellbeing over software performance and appalled that we too often forget the relationship between software performance and developer time and wellbeing.
- a_wild_dandan 4y ago
  I almost exclusively use "glutenous" apps (browser, VSCode, Spotify, Discord, etc.) and have yet to experience these Electron performance issues decried in HN comment crusades. Everything is perfectly snappy. Ditto for my acquaintances. The ROI on these optimizations likely wouldn't matter for the overwhelming majority of folk. I could be wrong. I often am. But I suspect that Electron consumes far more resources in the minds of HN users than it does in most computers.
  - Strom 4y ago
    It's possible you and your acquaintances can't tell. Similarly some people claim they can't tell a difference between a 720p video and higher. Or that they can't tell a difference between 128 kbps CBR MP3 and higher. However the differences are real and have been measured. [1] [2] You are welcome to argue that the performance work isn't worth prioritizing, but don't fall into the trap of claiming the performance gap doesn't exist. -- [1] https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ [2] https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/

mrguyorama 4y ago

My 2006 Vista machine, with two cores at 2.6ghz quite simply multitasked better than my current ryzen 5 3600 based machine. The one simple reason why is that all the programs I ran on that machine were native, while all the apps we run nowadays are blobs of javascript in a dumb chrome window. Eclipse ran better on my $600 laptop in 2012 than pycharm runs on my 6 core 2019 macbook. Also, on my macbook, high cpu activity causes constant pops in my audio, which is just a thing that happens with macbooks that people just ignore apparently.

redsaz 4y ago
My recollection of Vista was that everybody was complaining of its performance compared to XP because so much switched to .net-based apps, slogging everything down. It wasn't until Win7 that everybody was happy (it could even run on netbooks).

jiggawatts 4y ago

The new Notepad on Windows struggles to open files just a few hundred MB in size and visibly stutters and freezes when doing not much on a high end gaming PC. It is apparently an iron law of the Universe that all available computing power must be wasted.

fennecfoxy 4y ago
I'd say that's _because_ it's an old app that hasn't been rewritten ground up to take advantage of modern hardware resources.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  I'm talking about the NEW Notepad, which has been rewritten from the ground up to waste modern hardware resources.

LeBit 4y ago

Typing in Obsidian is often excruciatingly slow. It is an electron app. Typing in Sublime Text is always fast. Except for the first line which is the title of the tab. After that, it is fast. I often switch to ST to type, then copy and paste to the slow app. It's kinda nuts.