461–470 of 819 posts
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> 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).
If faster software was worth anything to people surely they'd pay for it.
I remember the moment I realized how fast computers are at uni. I was in an algorithms course, and one of our projects was to make a program which would read in the entire dataset from IMDB of films and actors, and calculate the shortest path between any actor and Kevin Bacon using actors and movies as nodes and roles as edges. I was working in C, and looking back I came up with a quite performant solution mostly by…
On a 3GHz CPU, one clock cycle is enough time for light to travel only 10cm. If you hold up a sign with, say, a multiplication, a CPU will produce the result before light reaches a person a few metres away.
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…
> 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…
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That explains why Electron apps and Web pages are slow but the post you're replying to is about games...
Ok fair enough, but the mindset is spreading: json (javascript) parsing is what caused GTA Online loading times to balloon and I dread playing Call of Duty online as it wants to download and install dozens of GBs every time I launch it.
I remember the moment I realized how fast computers are at uni. I was in an algorithms course, and one of our projects was to make a program which would read in the entire dataset from IMDB of films and actors, and calculate the shortest path between any actor and Kevin Bacon using actors and movies as nodes and roles as edges. I was working in C, and looking back I came up with a quite performant solution mostly by…
Why can't we have a language easy to read and maintain but also have the speed of C?
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Perhaps the solution is more on the bioengineering side of things: make smaller people so they can fit in smaller rooms.
That would have a nice side benefit or making space exploration much more economical. Faster too if you can bioengineer higher G resistance at the same time. Maybe someday the outer planets will be colonized by tiny humans measured in millimeters, with 125mm humans darting around the various moons shot out of repurposed tank canons, all laughing at the slow giants stuck down the gravity well on Earth.
I remember the moment I realized how fast computers are at uni. I was in an algorithms course, and one of our projects was to make a program which would read in the entire dataset from IMDB of films and actors, and calculate the shortest path between any actor and Kevin Bacon using actors and movies as nodes and roles as edges. I was working in C, and looking back I came up with a quite performant solution mostly by…
Why can't we have a language easy to read and maintain but also have the speed of C?
I remember the moment I realized how fast computers are at uni. I was in an algorithms course, and one of our projects was to make a program which would read in the entire dataset from IMDB of films and actors, and calculate the shortest path between any actor and Kevin Bacon using actors and movies as nodes and roles as edges. I was working in C, and looking back I came up with a quite performant solution mostly by…
Why can't we have a language easy to read and maintain but also have the speed of C?
Julia is fast, easy to read, and easy to write. But it's not easy to maintain. There is a direct tradeoff between dynamism on one hand making things easier to read/write and static enforceability on the other making it easier to maintain.