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How much your computer can do in a second

computers-are-fast.github.io

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Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#201

Post by TeMPOraL »

chii wrote: post #159
TeMPOraL wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're mostly using tools from the 70s We're using the shittier tools from the 70s, because the better tools died off - which is sad, because we still didn't manage to recreate some of the features those tools offered. The success of UNIX and C seems to be caused by the same phenomenon that causes Electron to succeed and bloat to proliferate - what wins aren't good solutions, but those which get popular quickly.

> aren't good solutions, but those which get popular quickly. but by the judgement of a majority, those tools are good! That's why it got popular. Any personal sense of aesthetics from you (or anyone) doesn't matter at all here, and most people who call tools that failed 'good' are only judging it by personal aesthetics.

I'm not talking aesthetics here; I'm talking about shitty engineering. Often legitimized by nonsense phrases like "worse is better" these days.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#202

Post by Johnny555 »

tedunangst wrote: post #106
gizmo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If slowness is the goal and if product managers insist on slowness, then you'd expect a lot of sleep() calls in commercial software (which has product managers) and no sleep() calls in open source software. This doesn't happen. What we see is that commercial software has better documentation, gets more long term maintenance and support, and supports more cumbersome enterprise features. Exactly what you'd expect when…

Actually, some software like facial recognition or OCR, does have sleep calls inserted because people don't believe it can be done as fast as it can be done. Thus, whenever I deposit checks at the ATM, I have to stand there and watch as some entirely unnecessary animation pretends to scan my check for ten seconds before I can have my card back.

I think that's the time to scan both sides of the check (which is not done with a photo scanner, but with a sheet fed scanner, so it's not instantaneous), upload the image (potentially over a very slow network link), add it to the OCR queue on the server, do the OCR, save the image, and return the results back to the ATM machine.

I highly doubt the ATM maker put in sleep calls to intentionally slow it down -- no one is going to be surprised if it takes 1 second instead of 10 seconds to scan a check.

The bank could optimize for time, but it's not their time, it's their customer's time and they are already saving so much money over a teller transaction, they likely don't care about saving customers a few seconds.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#204

Post by runeks »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #124
munificent wrote: post #44

If, like me, you spend most of your time in high-level, garbage collected "scripting" languages, it's really worth spending a little time writing a few simple C applications from scratch. It is astonishing how fast a computer is without the overhead most modern languages bring in. That overhead adds tons of value, certainly. I still use higher level languages most of the time. But it's useful to have a sense of how f…

Worth checking out Common Lisp. It's as high-level language as you can get, and yet good compilers (like SBCL, or like commercial ones from Franz and LispWorks) can compile it to tight assembly with performance very close to that of C++ (you need to disable some runtime checks for that though, but you can do that on a per-function level, so it's much less of a problem than one thinks).

Haskell is also really fast. On most Stack Overflow questions asking "why is this Haskell program slow", there's often a detailed answer with an implemention that's about as fast as -- or even faster than -- C:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/42771348/why-is-haskell-s...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6964392/speed-comparison-...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29875886/haskell-why-does...

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#205

Post by devwastaken »

dahart wrote: post #196
devwastaken wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even if you dither on the CPU, doing your color filters on the GPU instead of in JS could make the difference between interactive and not. Dithering requires quantization. If you mean things like brightness and contrast, yes, webgl is better for that. But quantization with error diffusion dithering is still based upon previous modified pixels, so you cannot just send a bunch of pixel info to webgl, you have to do ea…

> so you cannot just send a bunch of pixel info to webgl, you have to do each pixel seperately. Why do you think that? You certainly can get previously modified pixels, you can send millions of pixels to WebGL with a single call (as a texture). Nobody calls glReadPixels millions of times, that's a bad idea. :) You might want to investigate multipass rendering techniques. Small kernel convolutions, for example, are st…

>It sounds like you're missing render to texture and multipass techniques, the ways to use textures as compute I/O. To do multipass in WebGL and share the results of computation from one pass to the next, you create an offscreen framebuffer for your results, and you render directly to that framebuffer. You can then use the result as an input texture for the next pass (via glCopyTexImage2D) or you can read back the buffer (via glReadPixels) and then you repeat. Using glCopyTexImage2D is much faster because you never leave the GPU.

How are you writing many pixels to a framebuffer in a single instance? frag_color returns one pixel. Even if that OpenCL implimentation works in webgl, you'd still be at only 8 threads, so only 8 pixels that can be done at the same time, then you have to pass in the output to process again. 259200 glCopyTexImage2D calls for a 1920x1080 image since its 2073600 pixels.

I'll definetely look into this more, since that openCL implimentation might hold some answers on how the error distance is seperated to allow for 8 rows at a time.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#206

Post by dotancohen »

sametmax wrote: post #66
userbinator wrote: post #13

Alternatively, this could be titled "do you know how much your computer could do in a second but isn't because of bad design choices, overengineered bloated systems, and dogmatic adherence to the 'premature optimisation' myth?" Computers are fast, but not if all that speed is wasted. A recent related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014

It's wasted only if it's not traded for something else. But it is. A lot of system would simply not exist if we would have waited for people doing it properly because there is a limited pool of very skilled experts and the demand for IT far exceed our ability to supply. Plus writing good code takes a lot of time and resources, but our society changes now so fast that it very well maybe rewritten next year. Hence, we…

> E.G: wondering why you see electron apps everywhere now ? Because until now making a beautiful, powerful and modern app with a portable GUI was something only a few people would be able to do.

You should really take a look at Python and Qt. Beautiful, easily maintained and well-performing cross-platform apps have been a possibility with this pair for the better part of a decade. Anki is my favorite example, but there are plenty of others.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#207

Post by sametmax »

dotancohen wrote: post #206
sametmax wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wasted only if it's not traded for something else. But it is. A lot of system would simply not exist if we would have waited for people doing it properly because there is a limited pool of very skilled experts and the demand for IT far exceed our ability to supply. Plus writing good code takes a lot of time and resources, but our society changes now so fast that it very well maybe rewritten next year. Hence, we…

> E.G: wondering why you see electron apps everywhere now ? Because until now making a beautiful, powerful and modern app with a portable GUI was something only a few people would be able to do. You should really take a look at Python and Qt. Beautiful, easily maintained and well-performing cross-platform apps have been a possibility with this pair for the better part of a decade. Anki is my favorite example, but the…

I'm a python expert, I know. You are missing the point: electron apps target front end devs. They are more of them, a lot more, than any other type of dev and they don't want to learn a new tech. Hell they even ported js to the server, an awful language, to avoir using something else.

Plus saying qt is easy to use to them is like saying java is productive to a python dev. You are not on the same scale.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#208

Post by stymaar »

uryga wrote: post #147
millstone wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how. WebAssembly is more limited than JavaScript (e.g. no access to DOM), and also more limited than native code (e.g. much more limited threading story).

I thought they were working on adding DOM stuff too?

They are. And they are also working on having full multi-threading (thanks to SharedArrayBuffer).

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#209

Post by stymaar »

panic wrote: post #148
sametmax wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be clear, I dislike slow apps, I think current behemoth web pages size is a monstrosity and every time I start an electron app (minus the excellent vscode), I scream in my head. Yet. Most electron app I tried have a ratio result/effort far better than any other solutions for the dev.

Why do we care so much about the dev? There are way more people who use a typical program than there are people who develop it, and these people often use the program more frequently than the developers make changes to it. For example, if a feature is used every day for a year by 10,000 people, speeding it up by 200ms is worth over a month of developer time (200ms for 10,000 people over a year is 203 hours of time wa…

> For example, if a feature is used every day for a year by 10,000 people, speeding it up by 200ms is worth over a month of developer time (200ms for 10,000 people over a year is 203 hours of time wasted, which is about 25 8-hour days, or five 40-hour weeks).

Is your company ready to pay $10-20k to its software supplier to save 200ms per person ? Rationally it may be a good idea, but I sincerely doubt anybody would pay for that.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#210

Post by VeronicaHadley »

ori_b wrote: post #90
sametmax wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wasted only if it's not traded for something else. But it is. A lot of system would simply not exist if we would have waited for people doing it properly because there is a limited pool of very skilled experts and the demand for IT far exceed our ability to supply. Plus writing good code takes a lot of time and resources, but our society changes now so fast that it very well maybe rewritten next year. Hence, we…

I mostly do back end code. But when I look at electron and compare it to something like QT Quick, QT Quick looks much more pleasant and easy to use to me.

QT Quick is really adorable way to put in programming logic with improved UI.
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