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The corollary is Wirth's Law: >software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster. >Wirth attributed the saying to Martin Reiser, who in

The corollary is Wirth's Law: >software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster. >Wirth attributed the saying to Martin Reiser, who in the preface to his book on the Oberon System wrote: "The hope is that the progress in hardware will cure all software ills. However, a critical observer may observe that software manages to outgrow hardware in size and sluggishness." I wish that there would be more instances of developments like to Mac OS X 10.6, where rather than new features, the software was simply optimized for a given CPU architecture, and the focus was on improving performance.

sandworm101 1y ago
Software optimized for a particular processor is today's tech. In the future we may see CPUs that alter themselves to better serve the needs of software. I can see a day where a "cpu" was actually a bunch of different processors connected via a FPGA so that the software could reconfigure the CPU on the fly.
- llamasushi 1y ago
  Why the down votes here? This is an interesting idea.
jama211 1y ago
This doesn’t hold with my experience, I remember how slow my old machines used to be - especially the ones with spinning hard disks. Not to mention early smartphones… I’ve had computers in my youth I used to turn on then go and make a coffee. Now it’s practically instant.
- nottorp 1y ago
  > Now it’s practically instant. No it's not :) Phones do not shut down. Powering off and back on still takes forever. As for desktops, Windows at least keeps starting stuff in the background long after your UI gets displayed.
  - jama211 1y ago
    Yeeeah dude you have some seriously rose tinted glasses on. My windows machine can go from completely powered off to a big application like a web browser fully open and operational on maybe 10-15 seconds, and yes, fully powered off. No way I’m making coffee in that time. Sure, windows might run stuff in the background, but it’s so fast that stuff doesn’t get in the way of me using the thing at all. As for phones, “forever” is a silly thing to say but even if I granted you that one off boot time, you have somewhat moved the goalposts as you talked about the act of using software in day to day usage. On my laptop I can genuinely open 10 apps, close 10 apps, and open 10 apps again all within 10 seconds, probably faster if I wasn’t constrained by literal click actions. My computers growing up would grind to a halt if you tried to run like 3 things at once! There are always instances of inefficient software, but there was back in the day too, I remember generating a new map on civilisation 1 on my 286 and it taking 10 hours. There is no way you can possibly say that on average software is slower today than it used to be, that statement in general is just completely false.
    - bigstrat2003 1y ago
      The improvements you describe come down to one thing: solid state drives. If we had them in the 90s, your software would've been starting up just as fast (or even faster) then. Meanwhile, once the software did start, it ran faster and with fewer resources than software does today. It's not rose colored glasses: software today truly is worse on average than software 20 years ago.
      - jama211 1y ago
        You say that like once the software has started it had washed its hands of that slow spinning disk, anything that interacts with data (god, remember trying to do video editing 20 years ago?? It was hell) was a nightmare. And oh yeah, 100% I agree SSD’s are a huge factor as to why software runs faster now than it used to on average for day to day activities. Thanks for mentioning one of the things that helps demonstrate my point. But it is not the only thing, that’s for sure. I can think of a few other critical things that made usage of computing faster over the years, and I bet you can too. Partially unrelated but I once downloaded anime on dialup, used to take 30 hours per episode at low quality…
- SlowTao 1y ago
  The horrors of booting Windows 2000 on a Pentium 1. But there is something to be said about prior optimizations in limited resources. A few months back a friend was restoring a G4 iMac and I was astounded at how snappy the whole thing felt once the OS had finally loaded. We forget how snappy iTunes was while using only 30MB of RAM. If you can combine the best of boths worlds, there could be something special there. Modern OS and software are very bloated but it is astounding how fast the hardware crunches through all that. But it could be better.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jama211 1y ago
    There was bloated software back then too, everything’s relative in that regard. A huge amount of the “bloat” can also be attributed to project assets, we forget how restricted we used to be about the look and feel of applications also. I bet people who write 1980’s software said the same thing about iTunes needing a “bloat worthy” 30mb of ram, I mean, what single application could possibly need that much! Am I right?
- like_any_other 1y ago
  And yet https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
  - jama211 1y ago
    This is self reported to be mostly about screen latency, no one is stopping you using a crt monitor on your PC if you want to

sandworm101 1y ago

Software optimized for a particular processor is today's tech. In the future we may see CPUs that alter themselves to better serve the needs of software. I can see a day where a "cpu" was actually a bunch of different processors connected via a FPGA so that the software could reconfigure the CPU on the fly.

llamasushi 1y ago
Why the down votes here? This is an interesting idea.

jama211 1y ago

This doesn’t hold with my experience, I remember how slow my old machines used to be - especially the ones with spinning hard disks. Not to mention early smartphones… I’ve had computers in my youth I used to turn on then go and make a coffee. Now it’s practically instant.

nottorp 1y ago
> Now it’s practically instant. No it's not :) Phones do not shut down. Powering off and back on still takes forever. As for desktops, Windows at least keeps starting stuff in the background long after your UI gets displayed.
- jama211 1y ago
  Yeeeah dude you have some seriously rose tinted glasses on. My windows machine can go from completely powered off to a big application like a web browser fully open and operational on maybe 10-15 seconds, and yes, fully powered off. No way I’m making coffee in that time. Sure, windows might run stuff in the background, but it’s so fast that stuff doesn’t get in the way of me using the thing at all. As for phones, “forever” is a silly thing to say but even if I granted you that one off boot time, you have somewhat moved the goalposts as you talked about the act of using software in day to day usage. On my laptop I can genuinely open 10 apps, close 10 apps, and open 10 apps again all within 10 seconds, probably faster if I wasn’t constrained by literal click actions. My computers growing up would grind to a halt if you tried to run like 3 things at once! There are always instances of inefficient software, but there was back in the day too, I remember generating a new map on civilisation 1 on my 286 and it taking 10 hours. There is no way you can possibly say that on average software is slower today than it used to be, that statement in general is just completely false.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    The improvements you describe come down to one thing: solid state drives. If we had them in the 90s, your software would've been starting up just as fast (or even faster) then. Meanwhile, once the software did start, it ran faster and with fewer resources than software does today. It's not rose colored glasses: software today truly is worse on average than software 20 years ago.
    - jama211 1y ago
      You say that like once the software has started it had washed its hands of that slow spinning disk, anything that interacts with data (god, remember trying to do video editing 20 years ago?? It was hell) was a nightmare. And oh yeah, 100% I agree SSD’s are a huge factor as to why software runs faster now than it used to on average for day to day activities. Thanks for mentioning one of the things that helps demonstrate my point. But it is not the only thing, that’s for sure. I can think of a few other critical things that made usage of computing faster over the years, and I bet you can too. Partially unrelated but I once downloaded anime on dialup, used to take 30 hours per episode at low quality…
SlowTao 1y ago
The horrors of booting Windows 2000 on a Pentium 1. But there is something to be said about prior optimizations in limited resources. A few months back a friend was restoring a G4 iMac and I was astounded at how snappy the whole thing felt once the OS had finally loaded. We forget how snappy iTunes was while using only 30MB of RAM. If you can combine the best of boths worlds, there could be something special there. Modern OS and software are very bloated but it is astounding how fast the hardware crunches through all that. But it could be better.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jama211 1y ago
  There was bloated software back then too, everything’s relative in that regard. A huge amount of the “bloat” can also be attributed to project assets, we forget how restricted we used to be about the look and feel of applications also. I bet people who write 1980’s software said the same thing about iTunes needing a “bloat worthy” 30mb of ram, I mean, what single application could possibly need that much! Am I right?
like_any_other 1y ago
And yet https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
- jama211 1y ago
  This is self reported to be mostly about screen latency, no one is stopping you using a crt monitor on your PC if you want to