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The computers are fast, but you don't know it

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Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#92
post #6

I've been lightly banging the drum the last few years that a lot of programmers don't seem to understand how fast computers are, and often ship code that is just miserably slower than it needs to be, like the code in this article, because they simply don't realize that their code ought to be much, much faster. There's still a lot of very early-2000s ideas of how fast computers are floating around. I've wondered how m…

I upgraded a desktop machine the last time I visited my family. It was a Windows 7 computer that was at least 10 years old with 4GB of ram. They wanted to use it online for basic web browsing, so I thought I'd install Windows 10 for security reasons and drop in a modern SSD to upgrade the old 7200rpm drive to make it more snappy. Well, it felt slower after the "upgrade". Clicking the start menu and opening something…

You'll want to stop using the new start menu. Use OpenShell. It's fast and even better than the old menus.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree 100%. I wish every software engineer would spent at least a little time writing some programs in bare C and running them to get a feel for how fast a native executable can start up and run. It is breathtaking if you're used to running scripting languages and VMs. Related anecdote: My blog used to be written using Jekyll with Pygments for syntax highlighting. As the number of posts increased, it got closer and…

> I agree 100%. I wish every software engineer would spent at least a little time writing some programs in bare C and running them to get a feel for how fast a native executable can start up and run. It is breathtaking if you're used to running scripting languages and VMs. Conversely when 99.9% of the software you use in your daily life is blazing fast C / C++, having to do anything in other stacks is a complete exer…

Is performance inversely proportional to dev experience?

because what you wrote could be said about using C++ in the context of dev experience

10 compilers, IDEs, debuggers, package managers

and at the end of the day LLVM compiles 30min and uses tens of GBs of RAM on average hardware

I don't believe that this is the best we can get.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#94
post #6

I've been lightly banging the drum the last few years that a lot of programmers don't seem to understand how fast computers are, and often ship code that is just miserably slower than it needs to be, like the code in this article, because they simply don't realize that their code ought to be much, much faster. There's still a lot of very early-2000s ideas of how fast computers are floating around. I've wondered how m…

I upgraded a desktop machine the last time I visited my family. It was a Windows 7 computer that was at least 10 years old with 4GB of ram. They wanted to use it online for basic web browsing, so I thought I'd install Windows 10 for security reasons and drop in a modern SSD to upgrade the old 7200rpm drive to make it more snappy. Well, it felt slower after the "upgrade". Clicking the start menu and opening something…

In a similar vein I installed Ubuntu on an older laptop that had been running Windows 10. I was shocked at how fast it was compared to Windows 10, it was night and day.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#95
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And in the end, the code seems to run "fast enough" and nobody involved really notices that what is running in 750ms really ought to run in something more like 200us. Nobody has created a language that is both thousands of times faster than Python and nearly as straightforward to learn and to use. The closest thing I know of might be Julia, but that has its own performance problems and is tied closely to its AI/ML…

C# is faster than python and as easy to use.

Apparently Jupyter works with .net now. Cool

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#96
post #6

I've been lightly banging the drum the last few years that a lot of programmers don't seem to understand how fast computers are, and often ship code that is just miserably slower than it needs to be, like the code in this article, because they simply don't realize that their code ought to be much, much faster. There's still a lot of very early-2000s ideas of how fast computers are floating around. I've wondered how m…

Back in time all you needed for perfect performance is to use C and proper algorithms. It was easy. Nowadays you need vector operations, you need to utilise GPU, you need to utilise various accelerators. For me it is black magic.

But perfect performance isn't even the benchmark, it's "not ridiculously slow". This is what is meant by "Computers are fast, but you don't know it", you don't even know how ludicrously fast computers are because so much stuff is so insanely slow.

They're so fast that, in the vast majority of cases, you don't even need optimization, you just need non-pessimization: https://youtu.be/pgoetgxecw8

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#97
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And in the end, the code seems to run "fast enough" and nobody involved really notices that what is running in 750ms really ought to run in something more like 200us. Nobody has created a language that is both thousands of times faster than Python and nearly as straightforward to learn and to use. The closest thing I know of might be Julia, but that has its own performance problems and is tied closely to its AI/ML…

C# is faster than python and as easy to use.

As nice as it is, C# is definitely not as easy to use as Python.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#98
post #6

I've been lightly banging the drum the last few years that a lot of programmers don't seem to understand how fast computers are, and often ship code that is just miserably slower than it needs to be, like the code in this article, because they simply don't realize that their code ought to be much, much faster. There's still a lot of very early-2000s ideas of how fast computers are floating around. I've wondered how m…

I agree except for the Python bit, which is factually wrong.

Python allows you to program as if you’re a jazz pianist. You can improvise, iterate and have fun.

And when you found a solution you just refactor it and use numba. Boom, it runs the same speed as a compiled language.

I once wrote one little program that ran in 24 min without numba and ca. 8 seconds with numba.

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#99
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not only a matter of 750ms instead of 200ms. I'm astonished every time I open some tool like Visual Studio, SAP Power Designer, or Libre Office that can stay for the most part of a minute on its loading screen. What do those tools even do for that long? They can read enough data from the disk to overflow my computer's main memory a few times during it.

Not that it invalidates anything you said, but it was 750ms vs 200 microseconds. But yeah. I agree. Why does Lightroom take forever to load, when I can query its backing SQLite in no time at all? And that's not even mentioning the RAM elephant in the room: chrome. Younglings today don't understand what a mindbogglingly large amount of data a GB is. But here's the thing: it's cheaper to waste thousands of CPU cores on…

> But here's the thing: it's cheaper to waste thousands of CPU cores on bad performance than to have an engineer spend a day optimizing it.

No, it really isn't. It's only cheaper for the company making the software (and only if they don't use their software extensively, at that).

Re: The computers are fast, but you don't know it

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python allows one to save development time in exchange for execution time

Get beyond a certain size of python program and you lose dev time. IOW you lose both. It's not a huge size either.

Like... youtube?
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