4 ms·

Don't duck, it's the truth. We built really powerful computers and decided the best way to use them was to run web apps consisting of a poor performance script

by B-Con 13y ago

Don't duck, it's the truth. We built really powerful computers and decided the best way to use them was to run web apps consisting of a poor performance scripting language with a poor performance visual-rendering language and half the people who build with it seem to think that anything done in a web browser is free. "Modern" CSS for even a simple site is pretty silly. So many horribly inefficient rules, sometimes dozens of levels of overwriting properties, etc. And gobs upon gobs of Javascript that does very little but is constantly running, checking input boxes, animating every tiny little detail, doing things that can be done without Javascript, etc. I have better system performance when running a Windows 7 VM, a semi-bulky image editor, or compiling the kernel than I do with a few bulky webapps in Firefox. And this is on a desktop built just 4 years ago. I have a light-weight Linux setup that uses 80MB of RAM after logging in. It has 1GB of RAM. I can't run GMail and Facebook Firefox and browse the Internet at the same time with minimal open tabs. It's sad.

asveikau 13y ago
It's not like it's constrained to the web either. I had a bit of an epiphany about the state of desktop Windows a few years ago when for a hobby project I wrote a UI using only Win32 and C and no external dependencies. Maybe it took longer to write than it should have but I was really shocked at how the thing ran so much faster and smoother than just about any UI I was using on that machine. It dawned on me that all those layers of MFC, WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, WinRT and whatever else they'll come up with in the name of developer productivity are no match for a set of APIs designed to run at 25MHz with 8MB of RAM.
- ProNihilist 13y ago
  This is why I still use Winamp, nothing else comes close to dealing with playlists of thousands of items while also being fairly customisable.
  - FedRegister 13y ago
    Let us also not forget it's power to literally punish ungulates as well.
- mwcampbell 13y ago
  This is believable, but I'd like to dig a little deeper. Do you remember which Windows apps you were comparing yours against? And on what version of Windows?
  - asveikau 13y ago
    This was Windows 7, I am pretty sure with dwm disabled, and it was comparing (albeit informally) against every Windows app I used at the time. I know that some newer frameworks take advantage of GPU features (actually I used to work as a dev in the Windows org) but guess what, GDI is still faster.

by B-Con 13y ago

asveikau 13y ago

It's not like it's constrained to the web either. I had a bit of an epiphany about the state of desktop Windows a few years ago when for a hobby project I wrote a UI using only Win32 and C and no external dependencies. Maybe it took longer to write than it should have but I was really shocked at how the thing ran so much faster and smoother than just about any UI I was using on that machine. It dawned on me that all those layers of MFC, WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, WinRT and whatever else they'll come up with in the name of developer productivity are no match for a set of APIs designed to run at 25MHz with 8MB of RAM.

ProNihilist 13y ago
This is why I still use Winamp, nothing else comes close to dealing with playlists of thousands of items while also being fairly customisable.
- FedRegister 13y ago
  Let us also not forget it's power to literally punish ungulates as well.
mwcampbell 13y ago
This is believable, but I'd like to dig a little deeper. Do you remember which Windows apps you were comparing yours against? And on what version of Windows?
- asveikau 13y ago
  This was Windows 7, I am pretty sure with dwm disabled, and it was comparing (albeit informally) against every Windows app I used at the time. I know that some newer frameworks take advantage of GPU features (actually I used to work as a dev in the Windows org) but guess what, GDI is still faster.