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"Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

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Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#41

Post by ado__dev »

wredue wrote: post #25
ado__dev wrote: post #3

I feel like nobody really cares about optimization anymore. It's just "ship, ship, ship, move faster, ship." So there's a lot of tech-debt, a lot of unoptimized code, and a lot of "just make it work", at the expense of writing software that utilities the hardware properly. On the flip side of that though, hardware has gotten fast enough, where this is possible.

It’s actually worse than you think. Functional programmers have been in a massive propaganda campaign to actively paint optimization not just as “usually not necessary”, but actually as a negative thing. Ask any developer what they think of optimization, and the vast majority will respond “optimization is the root of all evil” or some other nonsense variant. Now that they’ve successfully paint optimization as bad, th…

Yeah and personally I've been on both ends of the spectrum. I think there is something to be said for pre-mature optimization and over-optimization. But I do feel like it's a lost art these days.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#42

Post by hinkley »

myself248 wrote: post #2

I've been saying for a while now, that developers and their managers should use a low-spec machine, let's say the 5th-percentile of whatever their users are using in the field, at least one day a week. This might force some reprioritizing of performance and efficiency goals. As long as devs spend their days with bugattis while writing software for corollas, this will continue to get worse.

This may end up being a place where some of the newish ideas in IDEs can help.

You want the fast machine because you want the code-build-test cycle to be fast, but for immediacy reasons we want a little more hardware than we really need so that we don't get bogged down too badly in worst-case scenarios.

So when we run the software on the machine along side this behemoth, we may or may not see something comparable to the users.

And then we also like for interactions to go faster for us so that we can quickly get to the end of a thought without having to drop everything and fix the slowness first (also, too few of us actually know how to fix the slowness instead of papering over it).

As we lean into multiple machines, or at least virtual machines, I can see a sliver of hope here where we offload rather large chunks of the IDE to resources the application itself cannot 'see', due to partitioning, remote calls, or both. Things like running the language server elsewhere, or the application in a container.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#43

Post by crazygringo »

richiebful1 wrote: post #23

Is this really true that software is getting slower? I've been using a budget Windows 10 desktop lately, and I'm shocked by how fast everything is running: ESRI ArcGIS, Firefox, code editors, etc. I remember having a budget desktop PC back in the mid 2000's and it was a significantly worse experience on very basic workflows (Excel, regular web browsing, etc)

Agreed. Between SSDs, blazing faster home DSL internet, and multicore processors, using a computer is much faster than it's ever been before.

Sure there's more software bloat, and webpage bloat, but if anything the overall user experience has gotten faster. And that's even with resource hogs like Retina displays and 4K video.

Like, go look up YouTube videos of people using older systems (not VM's). A Mac in 1989 takes forever to open an application, open a file, or save a file. The HDD clicking away... Remember how Word implemented "fast save" to shorten save times, which appended a lot of changes rather than rewriting the whole file? Nobody worries about that today.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#44

Post by FullstakBlogger »

wanderr wrote: post #10
myself248 wrote: post #2

I've been saying for a while now, that developers and their managers should use a low-spec machine, let's say the 5th-percentile of whatever their users are using in the field, at least one day a week. This might force some reprioritizing of performance and efficiency goals. As long as devs spend their days with bugattis while writing software for corollas, this will continue to get worse.

I hate this for developers. I got to experience this first hand because I had a boss who thought like you. Developers generally need to run a bunch of resource intensive tools to build the application in the first place, so an underpowered system will already be choking. It means their app will feel slow no matter what. So then when they run it and it's slow, they will shrug and say it's just slow because their syste…

Don't forget that development tools are also comically slow and bloated.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#45

Post by Xeamek »

wredue wrote: post #25
ado__dev wrote: post #3

I feel like nobody really cares about optimization anymore. It's just "ship, ship, ship, move faster, ship." So there's a lot of tech-debt, a lot of unoptimized code, and a lot of "just make it work", at the expense of writing software that utilities the hardware properly. On the flip side of that though, hardware has gotten fast enough, where this is possible.

It’s actually worse than you think. Functional programmers have been in a massive propaganda campaign to actively paint optimization not just as “usually not necessary”, but actually as a negative thing. Ask any developer what they think of optimization, and the vast majority will respond “optimization is the root of all evil” or some other nonsense variant. Now that they’ve successfully paint optimization as bad, th…

I don't think it's just about (or even mainly) functional programmers.

Look on something like java or kotlin, that are inherently slowing down EVERY.SINGLE.VARRIABLE. access by boxing them into objects.

On other hand there is rust, which takes quite a bit of inspiration from fp aproach but obviously still cares about the performance.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#46

Post by strangattractor »

ymerej wrote: post #13
ado__dev wrote: post #3

I feel like nobody really cares about optimization anymore. It's just "ship, ship, ship, move faster, ship." So there's a lot of tech-debt, a lot of unoptimized code, and a lot of "just make it work", at the expense of writing software that utilities the hardware properly. On the flip side of that though, hardware has gotten fast enough, where this is possible.

Doesn't it all boil down to economics in the end? When I worked at AOL, QA was very important/valued because our SW was shipped on CDs (I know, I know), and every bug/update cost us users because we had to download an update at modem speed. Now that I work on a web development team, bugs are easily fixed by an update. So who cares if there's a bug? We can just update the site. There are other costs, of course -- if w…

Total agree. There was a time when the deployment cycle was so long it was painful to ship poorly performing buggy software. Now people let their users do the testing.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#47

Post by xcv123 »

dist-epoch wrote: post #8

I'm not convinced this is true and not just a popular argument. Just today I've processed 4 TB of JSON data, in Python, on a desktop computer. That would be crazy to imagine 10 years ago. Yes, many cores, fast SSD, etc. Maybe it should be 20 TB if ultra optimized, but the capability advance is incredible. Yes, apps maybe start slowly, but now everybody can easily edit HD video on their mid-range laptop.

> That would be crazy to imagine 10 years ago

We had this in 2013. Would have handled the job with a well written parser.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/77779/i...

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#48

Post by alkonaut »

myself248 wrote: post #2

I've been saying for a while now, that developers and their managers should use a low-spec machine, let's say the 5th-percentile of whatever their users are using in the field, at least one day a week. This might force some reprioritizing of performance and efficiency goals. As long as devs spend their days with bugattis while writing software for corollas, this will continue to get worse.

I use a reasonably beefy machine to develop “heavy” desktop software. It’s definitely the kind discussed in this article. I find it frustrating that it has noticeable input lag even with moderate workloads for exactly the reasons mentioned.

But then you talk to end users and it turns out they work 80 hours on one big document with input lag of several seconds. Some actions can take 15 seconds. It’s mad. It’s larger than anything we imagined anyone to work on. It must be infuriating. And they don’t get beefier machines despite it being an instant cost saving. Because software is seen as magical anyway. They do in two days what would take 50 days to calculate by hand! That’s fast! So when you ask them what to prioritize surely they say “make it faster with heavy documents”? No, they want more features. Because a feature can save then days or weeks or months. A faster program just saves them hours. So I sort of understand them (and why we build software that grows slow).

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#49

Post by kayodelycaon »

toast0 wrote: post #32
wanderr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate this for developers. I got to experience this first hand because I had a boss who thought like you. Developers generally need to run a bunch of resource intensive tools to build the application in the first place, so an underpowered system will already be choking. It means their app will feel slow no matter what. So then when they run it and it's slow, they will shrug and say it's just slow because their syste…

I think it's reasonable to have a separate machine to do building on. You can include a push to the target in the build script, or use network mounts or something. Remote debugging is a thing, if you need to use a debugger but don't have the resources to debug on the target. But I disagree with your basic assumption that > It means their app will feel slow no matter what. If you can make it feel fast or at least resp…

Docker is slow enough without giving me crippled hardware.

Re: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

#50

Post by JonChesterfield »

richiebful1 wrote: post #23

Is this really true that software is getting slower? I've been using a budget Windows 10 desktop lately, and I'm shocked by how fast everything is running: ESRI ArcGIS, Firefox, code editors, etc. I remember having a budget desktop PC back in the mid 2000's and it was a significantly worse experience on very basic workflows (Excel, regular web browsing, etc)

Hard drive to SSD was a really big deal for general desktop experience. I used a ~first gen 30gb ssd with an intel atom for a while and that was fine provided I didn't try to compile anything. If your budget desktop has the OS on flash, that would do it.
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