4 ms·

> Or is the only solution to fix loading times in the first place? Ding! Ding! Ding! We got a winner! Yeah, maybe we could expect machines which got 40 years

by arkh 1y ago

> Or is the only solution to fix loading times in the first place? Ding! Ding! Ding! We got a winner! Yeah, maybe we could expect machines which got 40 years of Moore's law to give you an experience at least as snappy as what you got on DOS apps.

72deluxe 1y ago
Yes I am baffled how modern apps are painfully slow. Everything seems to include a Chrome Embedded Framework and therefore have an entire browser running. There is sadly a generation of people who grew up after .net was introduced who think it's perfectly reasonable for a VM spooling up as part of an app load or loading a browser is fine too, and have no idea how speedy Windows 95 used to be, or how loading an app took less than 1 second, or how easy Delphi apps were to create. It's honestly very sad.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  Let's not go too far with the rose tinted glasses. Win95 apps are speedy if you run them on modern hardware but at the time they were all dog slow because the average Win95 machine was swapping like crazy. Loading apps on it definitely did not take one second. The prevalence of splash screens was a testament to that. Practically every app had one whereas today they're rare. Even browsers had multi-second splash screens back then. Microsoft was frequently suspected to be cheating because their apps started so fast you could only see the splash for a second or two, and nobody could work out how they did it. In reality they had written a custom linker that minimized the number of disk seeks required, and everything was disk seek constrained so that made a huge difference. Delphi apps were easier to create than if you used Visual C++/MFC but compared to modern tooling it wasn't that good. I say that as a someone who grew up with Delphi. Things have got better. In particular they got a lot more reliable. Software back then crashed all the time.
  - 72deluxe 1y ago
    I suppose you are right. I worked with MFC/C++ and COM and it was horrible. Delphi and C++ Builder things were nicer to use but fell by the wayside, particularly after Borland lost their focus and didn't bother supporting VCL correctly in themes and also had major issues with their C++ compiler. They suffered a brain drain. I remember Windows Explorer opening swiftly back in the day (fileman even faster - https://github.com/microsoft/winfile https://github.com/microsoft/winfile now archived sadly) and today's Explorer experience drives me insane as to how slow it is. I have even disabled most linked-in menu items as the evaluation of these makes Explorer take even longer to load; I don't see why it can't be less than 1 second. Anyway, I do recall Netscape taking a long time to load but then I did only have a 486 DX2 66MHz and 64MB of RAM.... The disk churning did take a long time, now you remind me... I think using wxWidgets on Windows and Mac was quite nice when I did that (with wxFormBuilder); C++ development on Windows using native toolkits is foreign to me today as it all looks a mess from Microsoft unless I have misunderstood. In any case, I can't see why programs are so sluggish and slow these days. I don't understand why colossal JS toolkits are needed for websites and why the average website size has grown significantly. It's like people have forgotten how to write good speedy software.
    - mike_hearn 1y ago
      Well, today I spent a lot of time waiting for some slow software that I wrote and maintain, a program that helps ship large desktop apps that use JVM or Electron. It can do native apps too but nearly nobody writes those. So I guess I both feel and create your pain in several directions. Why is my software slow? Partly because the task is inherently intensive. Partly because I use an old Intel MacBook that throttles itself like crazy after too much CPU load is applied. Partly because I'm testing on Windows which has very slow file I/O and so any app that does lots of file I/O suffers. And partly because it's a JVM app which doesn't use any startup time optimizations. But mostly it's because nobody seems to care. People complain to me about various things, performance isn't one of them. Why don't I fix it anyway? Because my time is super limited and there's always a higher priority. Bug fixes come first, features second, optimizations last. They just don't matter. Also: optimizations that increase the risk of bugs are a bad idea, because people forgive poor performance but not bugs, so even doing an optimization at all can be a bad idea. Over the years hardware gave us much better performance and we chose to spend all of it on things like features, reducing the bug count, upping complexity (especially visual), simplifying deployment, portability, running software over the network, thin laptops and other nice things that we didn't have on Windows 98. Maybe AI will reduce the cost of software enough that performance becomes more of a priority, but probably not. We'll just spend it all on more features and bug fixes.
  - arkh 1y ago
    My benchmark is irfanview. I think I started using it on XP and you got to enjoy the speed from the install (3 clicks and where you'd expect a loading bar you get a "launch or close wizard").
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    > Let's not go too far with the rose tinted glasses. Win95 apps are speedy if you run them on modern hardware but at the time they were all dog slow because the average Win95 machine was swapping like crazy. I disagree that those apps were dog slow at the time. They were fairly responsive, in my experience. It's true that loading took longer (thanks to not having SSDs yet), but once the app was up it was fast. Today many apps are slow because software companies don't care about the user experience, they just put out slop that is barely good enough to buy.
- duped 1y ago
  > Yes I am baffled how modern apps are painfully slow. People underestimate how slow the network is, and put a network between the app and its logic to make the app itself a thin HTTP client and "application" a mess of networked servers in the cloud. The network is your enemy, but people treat it like reading and writing to disk because it happens to be faster at their desk when they test.
  - 72deluxe 1y ago
    I think all developers should test against a Raspberry Pi 3 for running their software (100mbps network link) just to concentrate on making it smaller and faster. This would eradicate the colossal JS libraries that have become the modern equivalent of many DLLs.
    - dijit 1y ago
      Modern iterations of the Pi have 1000Mbit but your statement has an even broader hole based on the context. Latency. The issue the parent mentions is one of latency, if you’re in the EU and your application server is in us-east-1 then you’re likely staring at a RTT of 200ms. The Pi under your desk from NY? 30ms- even less if its a local test harness running in docker on your laptop.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  It is really amazing how big gui flagship apps like office suite or adobe suite seem slower than they did in 2001. And really they don’t do anything different than these old tools maybe a few extra functions (like content aware fill in ps) but the bread and butter is largely the same. So why is it so slow? It is almost like they realized users are happy to wait 30-60 seconds for an app to open in 2001 and kept that expectation even as the task remained the same and computers got an order of magnitude more powerful in that time.
oblio 1y ago
When I want to make old devs cry I send them this link[1]: https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ I know it's very simple, I know there isn't a lot of media (and definitely no tracking or ads), but it shows what could be possible on the internet. It's just that nobody cares. [1] Yes, Hacker News is also quite good in terms of loading speed.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Private torrent trackers are generally fast too. My pet peeves is when news websites are slow, because the only content you have is 90% text.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    That 10% left of adware is heavy stuff

by arkh 1y ago

72deluxe 1y ago

Yes I am baffled how modern apps are painfully slow. Everything seems to include a Chrome Embedded Framework and therefore have an entire browser running. There is sadly a generation of people who grew up after .net was introduced who think it's perfectly reasonable for a VM spooling up as part of an app load or loading a browser is fine too, and have no idea how speedy Windows 95 used to be, or how loading an app took less than 1 second, or how easy Delphi apps were to create. It's honestly very sad.

mike_hearn 1y ago
Let's not go too far with the rose tinted glasses. Win95 apps are speedy if you run them on modern hardware but at the time they were all dog slow because the average Win95 machine was swapping like crazy. Loading apps on it definitely did not take one second. The prevalence of splash screens was a testament to that. Practically every app had one whereas today they're rare. Even browsers had multi-second splash screens back then. Microsoft was frequently suspected to be cheating because their apps started so fast you could only see the splash for a second or two, and nobody could work out how they did it. In reality they had written a custom linker that minimized the number of disk seeks required, and everything was disk seek constrained so that made a huge difference. Delphi apps were easier to create than if you used Visual C++/MFC but compared to modern tooling it wasn't that good. I say that as a someone who grew up with Delphi. Things have got better. In particular they got a lot more reliable. Software back then crashed all the time.
- 72deluxe 1y ago
  I suppose you are right. I worked with MFC/C++ and COM and it was horrible. Delphi and C++ Builder things were nicer to use but fell by the wayside, particularly after Borland lost their focus and didn't bother supporting VCL correctly in themes and also had major issues with their C++ compiler. They suffered a brain drain. I remember Windows Explorer opening swiftly back in the day (fileman even faster - https://github.com/microsoft/winfile https://github.com/microsoft/winfile now archived sadly) and today's Explorer experience drives me insane as to how slow it is. I have even disabled most linked-in menu items as the evaluation of these makes Explorer take even longer to load; I don't see why it can't be less than 1 second. Anyway, I do recall Netscape taking a long time to load but then I did only have a 486 DX2 66MHz and 64MB of RAM.... The disk churning did take a long time, now you remind me... I think using wxWidgets on Windows and Mac was quite nice when I did that (with wxFormBuilder); C++ development on Windows using native toolkits is foreign to me today as it all looks a mess from Microsoft unless I have misunderstood. In any case, I can't see why programs are so sluggish and slow these days. I don't understand why colossal JS toolkits are needed for websites and why the average website size has grown significantly. It's like people have forgotten how to write good speedy software.
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    Well, today I spent a lot of time waiting for some slow software that I wrote and maintain, a program that helps ship large desktop apps that use JVM or Electron. It can do native apps too but nearly nobody writes those. So I guess I both feel and create your pain in several directions. Why is my software slow? Partly because the task is inherently intensive. Partly because I use an old Intel MacBook that throttles itself like crazy after too much CPU load is applied. Partly because I'm testing on Windows which has very slow file I/O and so any app that does lots of file I/O suffers. And partly because it's a JVM app which doesn't use any startup time optimizations. But mostly it's because nobody seems to care. People complain to me about various things, performance isn't one of them. Why don't I fix it anyway? Because my time is super limited and there's always a higher priority. Bug fixes come first, features second, optimizations last. They just don't matter. Also: optimizations that increase the risk of bugs are a bad idea, because people forgive poor performance but not bugs, so even doing an optimization at all can be a bad idea. Over the years hardware gave us much better performance and we chose to spend all of it on things like features, reducing the bug count, upping complexity (especially visual), simplifying deployment, portability, running software over the network, thin laptops and other nice things that we didn't have on Windows 98. Maybe AI will reduce the cost of software enough that performance becomes more of a priority, but probably not. We'll just spend it all on more features and bug fixes.
- arkh 1y ago
  My benchmark is irfanview. I think I started using it on XP and you got to enjoy the speed from the install (3 clicks and where you'd expect a loading bar you get a "launch or close wizard").
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  > Let's not go too far with the rose tinted glasses. Win95 apps are speedy if you run them on modern hardware but at the time they were all dog slow because the average Win95 machine was swapping like crazy. I disagree that those apps were dog slow at the time. They were fairly responsive, in my experience. It's true that loading took longer (thanks to not having SSDs yet), but once the app was up it was fast. Today many apps are slow because software companies don't care about the user experience, they just put out slop that is barely good enough to buy.
duped 1y ago
> Yes I am baffled how modern apps are painfully slow. People underestimate how slow the network is, and put a network between the app and its logic to make the app itself a thin HTTP client and "application" a mess of networked servers in the cloud. The network is your enemy, but people treat it like reading and writing to disk because it happens to be faster at their desk when they test.
- 72deluxe 1y ago
  I think all developers should test against a Raspberry Pi 3 for running their software (100mbps network link) just to concentrate on making it smaller and faster. This would eradicate the colossal JS libraries that have become the modern equivalent of many DLLs.
  - dijit 1y ago
    Modern iterations of the Pi have 1000Mbit but your statement has an even broader hole based on the context. Latency. The issue the parent mentions is one of latency, if you’re in the EU and your application server is in us-east-1 then you’re likely staring at a RTT of 200ms. The Pi under your desk from NY? 30ms- even less if its a local test harness running in docker on your laptop.
kjkjadksj 1y ago
It is really amazing how big gui flagship apps like office suite or adobe suite seem slower than they did in 2001. And really they don’t do anything different than these old tools maybe a few extra functions (like content aware fill in ps) but the bread and butter is largely the same. So why is it so slow? It is almost like they realized users are happy to wait 30-60 seconds for an app to open in 2001 and kept that expectation even as the task remained the same and computers got an order of magnitude more powerful in that time.

oblio 1y ago

When I want to make old devs cry I send them this link[1]: https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ I know it's very simple, I know there isn't a lot of media (and definitely no tracking or ads), but it shows what could be possible on the internet. It's just that nobody cares. [1] Yes, Hacker News is also quite good in terms of loading speed.

skydhash 1y ago
Private torrent trackers are generally fast too. My pet peeves is when news websites are slow, because the only content you have is 90% text.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  That 10% left of adware is heavy stuff