4 ms·

Yeah no, I'd like non-performance critical programs to focus on other things than performance thank you

EliRivers 1y ago
Surely all programs are performance critical. Any program we think isn't is just a program where the performance met the criteria already.
- 6SixTy 1y ago
  Safety critical systems say hello.
  - oguz-ismail 1y ago
    > Safety critical systems Any concrete examples where we can see the code?
    - 6SixTy 1y ago
      sqlite is probably our best example. The project touts use within Airbus A350 and DO-178B certification.
      - EliRivers 1y ago
        Is there no performance requirement on these? Surely there must be. You can't wait forever for a response; safety critical systems are only safe if they work in time.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    Safety critical is of course also performance critical to an even greater extent than games. You can usually get away with a dropped frame but you can't miss, say, valve timings.
lo_zamoyski 1y ago
Indeed. All else remaining the same, a faster program is generally more desirable than a slower program, but we don't live in generalities where all else remains the same and we simply need to choose fast over slow. Fast often costs more to produce. Programming is a small piece of a larger context. What makes a program "good" is not a property of the program itself, but measured by external ends and constraints. This is true of all technology. Some of these constraints are resources, and one of these resources is time. In fact, the very same limitation on time that motivates the prioritization of development effort toward some features other than performance is the very same limitation that motivates the desire for performance in the first place. Performance must be understood globally. Let's say we need a result in three days, and it takes two days to write a program that takes one day to get the result, but a week to write a program that takes a second to produce a result, then obviously, it is better to write the program the first way. In a week's time, your fast program will no longer be needed! The value of the result will have expired. This is effectively a matter of opportunity cost.
- godelski 1y ago
  There's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix that works.
Sesse__ 1y ago
Hard disagree. I'd like word processors to not need ten seconds just to start up. I'd like chat clients not to use _seconds_ to echo my message back to me. I'd like news pages that don't empty my mobile data cap just by existing. All of these are “non-performance critical”, but I'd _love_ for them to focus on performance.
- ronsor 1y ago
  > I'd like news pages that don't empty my mobile data cap just by existing. To be fair, this is because they mostly care about serving ads. Without the ads, the pages are often fine.
  - Sesse__ 1y ago
    I have uBO, they're still obscenely large.
  - phalanx104 1y ago
    untrue. what bloats the modern web is the widespread AND suboptimal use of web frameworks. otherwise, making adblockers would dramatically speed up the loading of every website that uses ads, while it is true to some extent, is not the entire picture. anyways, i'm not saying that these libraries are always slow, but the users aren't aware of the performance characteristics and perf habits they should use while making use of such libraries. do you have any idea how many tens of layers of abstractions a "website" takes to reach your screen?
    - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
      untrue. what makes bloats the modern web is competing incentives and businesses choosing what they think is going to make them the most money.
  - godelski 1y ago
    Many things are slow because few programmers (or managers) care. Because they'll argue about "value" but all those notions of value are made up anyways. People argue "sure, it's not optimal, but it's good enough". But that compounds. A little slower each time. A little slower each application. You test on your VM only running your program. But all of this forgets what makes software so powerful AND profitable: scale. Since we always need to talk monetary value, let's do that. Shaving off a second isn't much if it's one person or one time but even with a thousand users that's over 15 minutes, per usage. I mean we're talking about a world where American Airlines talks about saving $40k/yr by removing an olive and we don't want to provide that same, or more(!), value to our customers? Let's say your employee costs $100k/yr and they use that program once a day. That's 260 seconds or just under 5 minutes. Nothing, right? A measly $4. But say you have a million users. Now that's $4 million! Now, play a fun game with me. Just go about your day as normal but pay attention to all those little speedbumps. Count them as $1m/s and let me know what you got. We're being pretty conservative here as your employee costs a lot more than their salary (2-3x) and we're ignoring slowdown being disruptive and breaking flow. But I'm willing to bet in a typical day you'll get on the order of hundreds of millions ($100m is <2 minutes). We solve big problems by breaking them into a bunch of smaller problems, so don't forget that those small problems add up. It's true even if you don't know what big problem you're solving.
not_your_vase 1y ago
This mentality brings you a loading screen when you start the calculator on windows.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
  What? Calculator starts up faster than I can figure out on where and on which screen it decided to open
  - dwringer 1y ago
    On this machine it took me about 8 seconds to get the start menu open, about 5 seconds to get it to recognize that I'd typed "calc", another 5 seconds for it to let me actually select it to launch, and then about 20 seconds from the calculator window appearing - in its empty loading state - for it to actually come up. I admit this computer is several years old - but ... it's... a calculator.
  - kiwijamo 1y ago
    On Windows 11 I can see a startup screen briefly before it loads the calculator buttons -- takes maybe 2 seconds all up -- seems to be 1 seconds to start up screen then another second to populate the buttons. But can understand why people feel it's a regression though as I reall the win95/98/me calc.exe would pretty much appear near instantly even on the CPU/RAM/etc of the day.
    - robinsonb5 1y ago
      I'm currently on a Windows 10 machine with Core i5 that's more than a decade old. The calculator takes a couple of seconds to start up - provided it's a "good" day (i.e. one when Windows isn't downloading updates or doing search indexing or malware scanning in the background.) But I also have a Core 2 Duo-based WinXP machine in easy reach (just to keep a legacy software environment alive) and its keyboard has a dedicated calculator button. The calculator is just there the moment I press that button - it's appeared long before I can even release the button.
    - 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
const_cast 1y ago
The fallacy here is that if we focus on performance we could, instead, be using that time to make the application better. The reality is that non-performant apps aren't non-performant because they're doing so many cool things. No, that compute is wasted. The digital equivalent of pushing a box up a hill then back down 1000 times. I mean, the types of performance issues I've seen is like: grab 100,000 records from the database, throw away 99,900, return 100 to the front end. Optimizing that saves orders of magnitude of time but the thing does the same thing. Like we're just being wasteful and stupid. Those records we throw away aren't being used for some super cool AI powered feature. Its just waste.

Surely all programs are performance critical. Any program we think isn't is just a program where the performance met the criteria already.

6SixTy 1y ago
Safety critical systems say hello.
- oguz-ismail 1y ago
  > Safety critical systems Any concrete examples where we can see the code?
  - 6SixTy 1y ago
    sqlite is probably our best example. The project touts use within Airbus A350 and DO-178B certification.
    - EliRivers 1y ago
      Is there no performance requirement on these? Surely there must be. You can't wait forever for a response; safety critical systems are only safe if they work in time.
- pjc50 1y ago
  Safety critical is of course also performance critical to an even greater extent than games. You can usually get away with a dropped frame but you can't miss, say, valve timings.

lo_zamoyski 1y ago

Indeed. All else remaining the same, a faster program is generally more desirable than a slower program, but we don't live in generalities where all else remains the same and we simply need to choose fast over slow. Fast often costs more to produce. Programming is a small piece of a larger context. What makes a program "good" is not a property of the program itself, but measured by external ends and constraints. This is true of all technology. Some of these constraints are resources, and one of these resources is time. In fact, the very same limitation on time that motivates the prioritization of development effort toward some features other than performance is the very same limitation that motivates the desire for performance in the first place. Performance must be understood globally. Let's say we need a result in three days, and it takes two days to write a program that takes one day to get the result, but a week to write a program that takes a second to produce a result, then obviously, it is better to write the program the first way. In a week's time, your fast program will no longer be needed! The value of the result will have expired. This is effectively a matter of opportunity cost.

godelski 1y ago
There's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix that works.

Sesse__ 1y ago

Hard disagree. I'd like word processors to not need ten seconds just to start up. I'd like chat clients not to use _seconds_ to echo my message back to me. I'd like news pages that don't empty my mobile data cap just by existing. All of these are “non-performance critical”, but I'd _love_ for them to focus on performance.

ronsor 1y ago
> I'd like news pages that don't empty my mobile data cap just by existing. To be fair, this is because they mostly care about serving ads. Without the ads, the pages are often fine.
- Sesse__ 1y ago
  I have uBO, they're still obscenely large.
- phalanx104 1y ago
  untrue. what bloats the modern web is the widespread AND suboptimal use of web frameworks. otherwise, making adblockers would dramatically speed up the loading of every website that uses ads, while it is true to some extent, is not the entire picture. anyways, i'm not saying that these libraries are always slow, but the users aren't aware of the performance characteristics and perf habits they should use while making use of such libraries. do you have any idea how many tens of layers of abstractions a "website" takes to reach your screen?
  - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
    untrue. what makes bloats the modern web is competing incentives and businesses choosing what they think is going to make them the most money.
- godelski 1y ago
  Many things are slow because few programmers (or managers) care. Because they'll argue about "value" but all those notions of value are made up anyways. People argue "sure, it's not optimal, but it's good enough". But that compounds. A little slower each time. A little slower each application. You test on your VM only running your program. But all of this forgets what makes software so powerful AND profitable: scale. Since we always need to talk monetary value, let's do that. Shaving off a second isn't much if it's one person or one time but even with a thousand users that's over 15 minutes, per usage. I mean we're talking about a world where American Airlines talks about saving $40k/yr by removing an olive and we don't want to provide that same, or more(!), value to our customers? Let's say your employee costs $100k/yr and they use that program once a day. That's 260 seconds or just under 5 minutes. Nothing, right? A measly $4. But say you have a million users. Now that's $4 million! Now, play a fun game with me. Just go about your day as normal but pay attention to all those little speedbumps. Count them as $1m/s and let me know what you got. We're being pretty conservative here as your employee costs a lot more than their salary (2-3x) and we're ignoring slowdown being disruptive and breaking flow. But I'm willing to bet in a typical day you'll get on the order of hundreds of millions ($100m is <2 minutes). We solve big problems by breaking them into a bunch of smaller problems, so don't forget that those small problems add up. It's true even if you don't know what big problem you're solving.

not_your_vase 1y ago

This mentality brings you a loading screen when you start the calculator on windows.

fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
What? Calculator starts up faster than I can figure out on where and on which screen it decided to open
- dwringer 1y ago
  On this machine it took me about 8 seconds to get the start menu open, about 5 seconds to get it to recognize that I'd typed "calc", another 5 seconds for it to let me actually select it to launch, and then about 20 seconds from the calculator window appearing - in its empty loading state - for it to actually come up. I admit this computer is several years old - but ... it's... a calculator.
- kiwijamo 1y ago
  On Windows 11 I can see a startup screen briefly before it loads the calculator buttons -- takes maybe 2 seconds all up -- seems to be 1 seconds to start up screen then another second to populate the buttons. But can understand why people feel it's a regression though as I reall the win95/98/me calc.exe would pretty much appear near instantly even on the CPU/RAM/etc of the day.
  - robinsonb5 1y ago
    I'm currently on a Windows 10 machine with Core i5 that's more than a decade old. The calculator takes a couple of seconds to start up - provided it's a "good" day (i.e. one when Windows isn't downloading updates or doing search indexing or malware scanning in the background.) But I also have a Core 2 Duo-based WinXP machine in easy reach (just to keep a legacy software environment alive) and its keyboard has a dedicated calculator button. The calculator is just there the moment I press that button - it's appeared long before I can even release the button.
  - 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

const_cast 1y ago

The fallacy here is that if we focus on performance we could, instead, be using that time to make the application better. The reality is that non-performant apps aren't non-performant because they're doing so many cool things. No, that compute is wasted. The digital equivalent of pushing a box up a hill then back down 1000 times. I mean, the types of performance issues I've seen is like: grab 100,000 records from the database, throw away 99,900, return 100 to the front end. Optimizing that saves orders of magnitude of time but the thing does the same thing. Like we're just being wasteful and stupid. Those records we throw away aren't being used for some super cool AI powered feature. Its just waste.