151–160 of 329 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shit is slower than it was in the 90s. Spotify is slower than Winamp, Slack is slower than IRC, Webmail is slower than my e-mail client, VS Code is slower than Visual C++ 6.0.
Yeah, this is the weirdest thing to me: Windows NT 3.51 on a Pentium was much snappier perceptibly than even my new M1 MBP (developers are already expanding to the new performance envelope).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this is the weirdest thing to me: Windows NT 3.51 on a Pentium was much snappier perceptibly than even my new M1 MBP (developers are already expanding to the new performance envelope).
Windows Server 2019 has a much snappier UI then Windows 10 I've found (I recently spent a ton of time automating installs for both and boy did that become noticeable). Then you look at the Windows 10 list of crapware and it becomes a lot clearer.
It’s incredible how much grief Windows Vista got in comparison.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. Almost all software I use these days is absurdly slower than it should be and probably a massive drain on collective productivity. I have ssd, fast internet, 64gb ddr4 etc, almost everything I do should be impercetibly instant but instead takes seconds and even minutes. Yeah of course most of that slowness is not even because of ignorance of the low level stuff but complete disregard of performance aspect…
I dont know if you've noticed, but most programmers actually do care about performances. They just are bad at it. Software are slow precisely because programmers dont get it: optimising all the code will make slow software. They spend their budget optimising 99% of the code and end up with no more money to make that last 1% fast. For real (game engine programmer speaking). Plus optimising all the code make all the co…
Unfortunately not all kinds of slowness only happen in hotspots. This is true for CPU cycles, but if an occasional task uses all memory, it's going to mess up everything downstream as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. Almost all software I use these days is absurdly slower than it should be and probably a massive drain on collective productivity. I have ssd, fast internet, 64gb ddr4 etc, almost everything I do should be impercetibly instant but instead takes seconds and even minutes. Yeah of course most of that slowness is not even because of ignorance of the low level stuff but complete disregard of performance aspect…
Shit is slower than it was in the 90s. Spotify is slower than Winamp, Slack is slower than IRC, Webmail is slower than my e-mail client, VS Code is slower than Visual C++ 6.0.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The other thing for which OO works much better than plain data is GUIs This cannot be further from my experience. Switching from Java/AWT/Swing to ClojureScript/Reagent/Re-frame has been suoer liberating. Every GUI programmer must fiddle with reagent once: https://reagent-project.github.io/
Well, you really picked the worst representative with awt/swing. I'd say Qt or even classic VB6/Delphi are great examples for OOP gui development.
> What if a programming language would provide us with a structure that would act like an array of structs, but internally it would really behave like a struct of arrays? We could program in the typical object oriented way that is convenient for humans, while still enjoying in great performance due to playing nice with the hardware. > So far, the only programming language I know of that supports this type of crazy da…
Haskell uses linked lists everywhere, so any transformation like this likely does nothing for speed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are steady, predictable, iterative improvements. We have nothing groundbreaking like 1970s-1990s. Of course I'm not saying modern hardware is slow, but it's not progressing like it used to.
That is both not true and not what you said at first. Transistor density has continued to rise but there is only so much you can do when people mostly run javascript on a single thread. There were a lot more break throughs in the early days of electronic components too because everything was new. CPUs are a world away from where they were two decades ago, but people don't notice because typing into a facebook window…
The implicit premise of the article seems to be that all software has to be heavily optimized. This is completely wrong. All the languages mentioned in the article are still around because it doesn’t matter how performant 99% of code is. For the 1%, we can think about cache misses, SIMD and data parallel approaches. In my experience this is totally possible and not too hard, but has the enormous downside of making th…
I disagree. Almost all software I use these days is absurdly slower than it should be and probably a massive drain on collective productivity. I have ssd, fast internet, 64gb ddr4 etc, almost everything I do should be impercetibly instant but instead takes seconds and even minutes. Yeah of course most of that slowness is not even because of ignorance of the low level stuff but complete disregard of performance aspect…
The business model isn't right for performant experiences
Another orthogonal aspect with modern hardware is the increased amount of parallel execution. Most of the standard programming languages are not really designed to support this well. So we use extensions like CUDA. But this is not really general purpose but only for GPU. Once we reach maybe 100 cores, or 1000 cores, or some orders of magnitude more cores in the CPU, we have to have better general purpose language sup…