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It takes a PhD to develop that

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Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#211

Post by FridgeSeal »

lbayes wrote: post #196
TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding. It takes doing some low-level gamedev[0] stuff, or using software written by people like Casey, to realize just how fast software can be. There's an art to it, and it hits diminishing returns with complex software, but the baseline of popular software is so low it doesn't take much more than a pinch of care to beat it by an order of magnitude. (Cue in the "but why bother, my app is IO bound anyway" counter…

I feel obliged to point out the destructive power of Knuth's statement, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." I have encountered far too many people who interpret that to mean, "thou shall not even even consider performance until a user, PM or executive complains about it."

Which of course, never really happens, because PM’s and execs always want more features, and performance is never a feature for them until it becomes so noticeably bad that they begrudgingly admit they should do the minimum to make users stop complaining.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#212

Post by xvf22 »

AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #52
jiggawatts wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This particular case was discussed at length on Reddit and on YC News. The general consensus was that the Microsoft developers simply didn't have performance in the vocabulary, and couldn't fathom it being a solvable problem despite having a trivial scenario on their hands with no complexity to it at all. The "complaining developer" produced a proof of concept in just two weekends that notably had more features[1] an…

A bit out of topic but has anybody followed performance issues of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020? For more than half a year it was struggling with performance because it was CPU heavy, only loading one core and etc. Barely ran on my i5 6500. Fast forward half a year, they want to release it on XBox. MS/Asobo moves a lot of computation on GPU, game starts running smoothly on the very same i5 with maximized quality se…

The damn downloader in MSFS is the most infuriating thing. In Canada on either of the main ISPs I too out at 40ish Mbps whereas Steam and anything else really does close to the full 500Mbps. It also only downloads sequentially, pausing to decrypt each tiny file. And the updates are huge so it takes a good long while to download 2+GB.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#213

Post by mwcampbell »

maficious wrote: post #180
mwcampbell wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, his experience, in games and game development tools AFAIK, might not be fully applicable to the development of mainstream commercial software that has to try to be all things to all people, including considerations like internationalization, accessibility, and backward compatibility. The performance difference that he demonstrated between Windows Terminal and refterm is certainly dramatic, but I wouldn't be…

How is it not applicable when the thing at question is rendering text and rendering is the core of game development? This argument is stupid. Do you have to be a slowpoke to develop commercial apps?

My point is that a UI that meets the needs of as many users as possible, including things like internationalization and accessibility, is much more complex than a typical game UI. That complexity drives developers to use abstractions that often make it much more difficult to optimize. And in the big picture, support for these things that add complexity is often more important than top-speed rendering.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#214

Post by avereveard »

mwcampbell wrote: post #209
avereveard wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://i.imgur.com/WeV8Ror.png no, doesn't work with cascadia either. so what now?

I suspect an i18n issue. What locale are you using, and what is the decimal separator character supposed to be in your locale?

https://i.imgur.com/WrsVwFz.png

absolutely standard

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#215

Post by beached_whale »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101
Hnus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I saw this mentioned on HN I immediately knew this kind of comment would be there because something along the lines and I am paraphrasing "its probably fast because its not enterprise enough" was repeated in every place the refterm was shared by different people even multiple times even after showing all the proof in the world that its in fact the opposite they almost refused to believe that software can be that…

Seconding. It takes doing some low-level gamedev[0] stuff, or using software written by people like Casey, to realize just how fast software can be. There's an art to it, and it hits diminishing returns with complex software, but the baseline of popular software is so low it doesn't take much more than a pinch of care to beat it by an order of magnitude. (Cue in the "but why bother, my app is IO bound anyway" counter…

Even something like a JSON parser is often claimed to be IO bound. It almost never is because few could keep up with modern IO and some cannot keep up with old HD’s

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#216

Post by stephc_int13 »

lbayes wrote: post #196
TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding. It takes doing some low-level gamedev[0] stuff, or using software written by people like Casey, to realize just how fast software can be. There's an art to it, and it hits diminishing returns with complex software, but the baseline of popular software is so low it doesn't take much more than a pinch of care to beat it by an order of magnitude. (Cue in the "but why bother, my app is IO bound anyway" counter…

I feel obliged to point out the destructive power of Knuth's statement, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." I have encountered far too many people who interpret that to mean, "thou shall not even even consider performance until a user, PM or executive complains about it."

Agreed, as a young performance oriented coder I've been often looked down by people who used Knuth almost god-like authority to dress up all sorts of awful engineering.

And of course most people don't know the full quote and they don't care about what Knuth really meant at the time.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#217

Post by _trampeltier »

yetihehe wrote: post #158
_trampeltier wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look closer everybody who create something on work, like every craftsman, is a kind of an artist. But it pays very badly, so even for people who like the job, are forced to step up into the office, because of the better pay. That is part if the reason, why you almost can't find a good plumber or electrician. If you can count to 2, you are forced out of the job. As you long, as you write software by yourself, y…

> As you long, as you write software by yourself, you are not much different than a plumber .. you work with your hands. There is one small difference - a plumber needs to design some piping and then execute it which takes more time than designing. After writing code, programmer just presses a button and results are made by computer. Otherwise, there is some overlap. There are many programmers, who are not more skill…

Yes, of course and copying and use something is almost for free in the digital domain vs real world.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#218

Post by maficious »

avereveard wrote: post #210
maficious wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "font some random HN commenter happened to use" is some f****** proportional Calibri. I want to see someone use it in any terminal emulator. Refterm defaults to Cascadia Code, but, fair enough, it doesn't have fallback yet. Its' description says also: "Reference monospace terminal renderer". "monospace" is there for a reason. It's worth mentioning though, that Windows Terminal also defaults to Cascadia Code and C…

> some f*** proportional Calibri Refterm defaults to Cascadia Code cascadia is as borken as the other font, so what now? https://i.imgur.com/WeV8Ror.png maybe writing a unicode rendering isn't that easy? maybe drop the attitude?

Turned out it defaults to Cascadia Mono, my bad. Still your argument is wrong, because, like it doesn't work on your machine, on mine it does.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#219

Post by stephc_int13 »

thom wrote: post #103
Hnus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I saw this mentioned on HN I immediately knew this kind of comment would be there because something along the lines and I am paraphrasing "its probably fast because its not enterprise enough" was repeated in every place the refterm was shared by different people even multiple times even after showing all the proof in the world that its in fact the opposite they almost refused to believe that software can be that…

Worth bearing in mind that Casey has a long history of unsuccessfully trying to nudge Microsoft to care about performance and the fact that he's still being constructive about it is to his credit.

I highly respect Casey but given his abrasive communication style I sometimes wonder if he is not trying to trigger people (MS devs in this case) to push him back so he can make his point.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#220

Post by moffkalast »

amw-zero wrote: post #202
tinco wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the experienced developer is Casey Muratori who is somewhat well known for being a very experienced developer. That makes it less likely that he doesn't know what he's talking about and is skipping over hard/slow features.

And he had a condescending tone from the beginning (as he always does). Maybe if he was more respectful / likable, the developers would have responded better.

Well given how absurdly big the difference is, and the main thing he did was render on demand instead of 7000fps I think he has a good reason to be condescending and they totally deserve it for wasting millions of people's time with this shit.
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