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It takes a PhD to develop that

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Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#391

Post by wtallis »

ohazi wrote: post #374
burnished wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL2 worked for me in a way that WSL1 did not and it had to do with build times while doing tutorial projects. I am not an expert, but my own experience was that it was a massive improvement.

Parent is not refuting that WSL2 performed better than WSL1, they're arguing that a reasonable response to WSL1 giving you slow build times might have simply been to use a VM instead. Microsoft being Microsoft, they didn't want people like you to hop to VMware or VirtualBox and use a full, branded instance of Fedora or Ubuntu, because then you would realize that the next hop (moving to Linux entirely) was actually qu…

Additionally, the problems that held back WSL1 performance still exist, and WSL1 wasn't their only victim. So Microsoft has abandoned WSL1, but they still need to address those underlying problems. Only now, if they do successfully deal with those issues (most likely as part of their DirectStorage effort and cloning io_uring), we're unlikely to see WSL1 updated to benefit—even though that might result in WSL1 becoming a better user experience than WSL2.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#392

Post by wtallis »

thn-gap wrote: post #292
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (a) it’s GPLv2 Why is that a problem? A GPLv2 terminal would not be a business problem for Microsoft. People would still have to buy licenses for Windows. Maybe they would lose a little face, but arguably they have already done so. At least it’s not GPLv3 which this industry absolutely and viscerally hates (despite having no problem Apache 2.0 for some reason, Theo de Raadt is at least consistent).

If Microsoft embedded the GPLv2 terminal into Windows, Windows would have to release as GPLv2 (or compatible license). I assume they don't want that. They can alternatively buy a commercial license, as another user said below.

You should read up on the "mere aggregation" clause of the GPLv2. It allows an OS to include a GPLv2 program without having to put the entire OS under the GPLv2. If the GPLv2 did function the way you seem to think it does, then almost every Linux distro would be in violation, too.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#393

Post by ctvo »

gnustop wrote: post #221
amw-zero wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where? He started completely neutral here: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 We live in a time where every competent developer is slandered in public if he isn't fully submissive to the great corporate powers.

For those curious, what was the outcome of this closed issue? Did Casey make a working terminal on Windows outside of a text renderer? Did Microsoft incorporate his feedback?

My worry is that Casey did this technical performance for the benefit of his followers, and nothing of value was gained, except of course Casey's growing fame.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#394

Post by lkey »

wtallis wrote: post #371
lkey wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the open source volunteers and random employees deserve it. They are responsible for all of microsoft's many sins, and we should find them online and tell them they are trash tier developers until they learn their lesson, right? Ok, sarcasm off. This attitude is utterly toxic. People who are ignorant of how fast their software could be do not deserve abuse from strangers.

> People who are ignorant of how fast their software could be do not deserve abuse from strangers. That's not the only valid way to frame the situation. At some level, professional software developers have a responsibility to be somewhat aware of the harm their currently-shipping code is doing.

Taking responsibility (which the developers later did by the way, even in this thread) and enduring abuse (which is also well documented here and elsewhere) should not be put on the same level.

More broadly, I'd much rather endure a slightly slow terminal made by developers acting in the open and in (mostly) good faith than the intentionally malicious software produced by actual bad actors within Google, Facebook, Microsoft et all..

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#395

Post by Shorel »

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."

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time.

Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#396

Post by Shorel »

mwcampbell wrote: post #213
maficious wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Games usually handle internationalization and accessibility much better than most software.

This includes audio localization (something no 'Enterprise' software has ever needed AFAIK), and multiple colour palettes for different types of colour blindness.

Sometimes video games are the only software with reasonable localizations I ever find installed in a particular computer.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#397

Post by Shorel »

Whatever the comments from both Microsoft and Casey Muratori about particular details of their implementations, Windows lacks a terminal like Linux Kitty (there's an unrelated Kitty that's just a fork of PuTTY).

And by that I mean speed and features. Kitty is fast and a joy to use, and it is the software I miss the most when I am using Windows.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#398

Post by SxC97 »

j_barbossa wrote: post #183
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 pretty one sided view. I use Windows terminal because it supports multiple tabs - multiple cmds and some WSL bashes. I don't care at all if this or that terminal uses a bit more RAM or is a few milliseconds faster.

> I don't care at all if this or that terminal uses a bit more RAM or is a few milliseconds faster

Did you watch the video? The performance difference is huge! 0.7 seconds vs 3.5 minutes.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#399

Post by wtallis »

lkey wrote: post #394
wtallis wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who are ignorant of how fast their software could be do not deserve abuse from strangers. That's not the only valid way to frame the situation. At some level, professional software developers have a responsibility to be somewhat aware of the harm their currently-shipping code is doing.

Taking responsibility (which the developers later did by the way, even in this thread) and enduring abuse (which is also well documented here and elsewhere) should not be put on the same level. More broadly, I'd much rather endure a slightly slow terminal made by developers acting in the open and in (mostly) good faith than the intentionally malicious software produced by actual bad actors within Google, Facebook, Mi…

"Abusive" is probably the the best one-word description of the way Microsoft and its software interacts with users. But I thing we'd agree it's a bit of a stretch to apply that to the case of a slightly slow terminal. However, it is absolutely fair to call it abusive when Microsoft tries to deny their problems or lie to their users that those problems are not Microsoft's fault and are something the users must simply put up with.

It's also important to keep in mind the vast asymmetry here. When Microsoft deploys problematic software, even a relatively minor problem will be responsible for many man-hours of frustration and wasted time. Far more man-hours than are ruined when a few developers have bad things said about them online. One doesn't excuse the other, but you can't ignore one of the harms simply because it's more diffuse.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#400

Post by dllthomas »

wtallis wrote: post #373
dllthomas wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is a yes/no question aggressive? Have you stopped beating your wife? More relevantly, when the question is asked genuinely then - as you say - it's expressing an openness to learn. Sometimes it is asked rhetorically, dripping with sarcasm and derision. In that case, it is clearly not furthering our interest in productive, good-faith discussions. Far more often, it falls somewhere between those two and - especia…

If you're going to read emotional content into that "Am I missing something?", I think sarcasm and derision are not the most plausible options. In this case, it seems like incredulity is the more likely and appropriate reaction: because it seemed like the person asking the question was putting a lot more thought and effort into the discussion than the Microsoft developers who were not willing to seriously reconsider…

Oh, I didn't mean that sarcasm and derision is how the Microsoft developers interpreted the phrase. I was speaking to the notion that the question was necessarily innocent and could only be interpreted thusly.

I would say that incredulity falls within the range between "completely inoffensive" and "outright hostile", and very much toward the former side of the scale. It can be hard to distinguish from feigned incredulity, which (while still far from "sarcastic and derisive") makes its way toward the other side somewhat.

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