4 ms·

> But like, it's 2023... Having that requirement isn't a hard sell. Especially considering the base of Windows and macOS have fancy requirements as a base. I t

> But like, it's 2023... Having that requirement isn't a hard sell. Especially considering the base of Windows and macOS have fancy requirements as a base. I think this is a sad attitude, when software actually has quite a high carbon footprint[1] on par with the aviation industry. There is so much old hardware that would work just fine if we actually cared to make software that works for them. I think new software should lower the requirement, and better hardware should mean faster software, not that developers can get wasteful. [1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ai-internet-carbon-footprint/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ai-internet-carbon-fo...

trealira 3y ago
There was a video from Twitter shared on HN a while back of Windows 95 or 98 (I don't remember which) running on a modern computer, and all programs and menus loaded instantly when clicked, not like now where there's often a small delay. It would be great if better hardeware meant the same thing but snappier, rather than the same thing but more inefficient. However, that speed came at the cost of laborious optimization for the low-end computers of the time and millions of dollars spent by Microsoft debugging defective C and assembly code within Windows. The only way to force software to be more efficient would be some sort of cap on how inefficient software were allowed to be, which doesn't seem possible. At most, you can have a carbon tax, or increase taxes on electricity use, indirectly incentivizing the use of energy-efficient software.
- myaccountonhn 3y ago
  Another way can be to try to lower the bar to write performant code. For example, the work in languages like Rust, Nim, Hare and Roc might also unlock capabilities to write low-level performant code with the same productivity as high-level languages. I def. agree though tat a carbon tax to force companies to be more frugal would help too. I've heard too many times to not think about optimization and just throw more hardware at problems, I think that's a mentality we really need to start questioning.
  - trealira 3y ago
    I agree Rust lowers the bar to write low-level performant code (especially considering that it was always harder to write correct C than, say, correct Ada) but I don't think it's always necessary to write code in non-garbage-collected for decent performance. We just need to use garbage collected programming languages that are statically typed, don't rely on a runtime on the host computer (e.g. the JVM), are memory safe and have predictable performance characteristics. All I can think of are Swift, OCaml, and Standard ML. In Go, your program causes a segmentation violation if it dereferences a null pointer, so I won't call it completely memory-safe, but it's still an improvement in abstraction compared to C while still providing performance.

trealira 3y ago

There was a video from Twitter shared on HN a while back of Windows 95 or 98 (I don't remember which) running on a modern computer, and all programs and menus loaded instantly when clicked, not like now where there's often a small delay. It would be great if better hardeware meant the same thing but snappier, rather than the same thing but more inefficient. However, that speed came at the cost of laborious optimization for the low-end computers of the time and millions of dollars spent by Microsoft debugging defective C and assembly code within Windows. The only way to force software to be more efficient would be some sort of cap on how inefficient software were allowed to be, which doesn't seem possible. At most, you can have a carbon tax, or increase taxes on electricity use, indirectly incentivizing the use of energy-efficient software.

myaccountonhn 3y ago
Another way can be to try to lower the bar to write performant code. For example, the work in languages like Rust, Nim, Hare and Roc might also unlock capabilities to write low-level performant code with the same productivity as high-level languages. I def. agree though tat a carbon tax to force companies to be more frugal would help too. I've heard too many times to not think about optimization and just throw more hardware at problems, I think that's a mentality we really need to start questioning.
- trealira 3y ago
  I agree Rust lowers the bar to write low-level performant code (especially considering that it was always harder to write correct C than, say, correct Ada) but I don't think it's always necessary to write code in non-garbage-collected for decent performance. We just need to use garbage collected programming languages that are statically typed, don't rely on a runtime on the host computer (e.g. the JVM), are memory safe and have predictable performance characteristics. All I can think of are Swift, OCaml, and Standard ML. In Go, your program causes a segmentation violation if it dereferences a null pointer, so I won't call it completely memory-safe, but it's still an improvement in abstraction compared to C while still providing performance.