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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."

#81

Post by rahkiin »

metalliqaz wrote: post #77
butz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some big business companies this is solved by pre-installed "security software" that usually takes up about half of the RAM, sometimes even more, and is using a measurable chunk of CPU all the time.

I totally feel this comment, myself being a corporate drone that has to deal with this software. Between disk encryption, anti virus, IT asset management, data custody tracking, etc; my PC is as slow as molasses. Unfortunately I think its slow in a different way that low-spec machines are slow. Mine is very slow on IO ops, but I have 32GB of RAM and a 20-core i7, so plenty of resources available even after all the BS…

I could use some tips on talking with IT about this as it cripples work performance

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

#82

Post by Xeamek »

dijit wrote: post #76
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 work in video games. My Lead QA recently accosted me regarding the low-spec machine being unusable. (it's an 11th Gen i5, 16GiB Ram and an Intel ARC A750). He wanted me to get a better machine. I politely declined indicating that this is the low spec machine, he made a fuss and I said if we can't make it run on that then we should stop making video games. For context: The weak part for us was the CPU; the ARC A750…

Games are lightyears ahead of 'common use software' when it comes to usability. Sure, there are bad, poorly optimized or simply unplayable games out there. But still, even the lowest of them are still insanely complex when compared to the software we are complaining here, ie. text communicators.

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

#83

Post by SubjectToChange »

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.

I feel like nobody really cares about optimization anymore.

Until customers care about performance/optimization, most businesses won't care. Eventually there will come a day where hardware will stagnate sufficiently to incentivize software efficiency.

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

#85

Post by Joeboy »

Pydantic 2.x is much faster than Pydantic 1.x. Polars is a much faster replacement for Pandas. Tauri seems to be getting some traction as a much more lightweight replacement for Electron. Python's got significantly faster in recent releases, and is planning to (optionally) drop the GIL which will improve things further.

From where I sit this doesn't right now seem particularly true. Developers are focusing on efficiency, not bloat.

On the other hand my first computer ran at 3.5MHz so I can't deny the historical truth of it.

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

#86

Post by threatofrain »

loglog wrote: post #67
threatofrain wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimizing performance is very nontrivial and often means writing custom stuff, which will deeply affect TCO. It’s fine for devs to sympathize with users, but in the most ultimate perspective the users are actual or potential customers of the business and not your clients. In other words, the business should have ultimate authority and responsibility to structure incentives and pursue priorities. Up until the enginee…

In enterprise software, optimizing performance usually means removing the custom stuff.

I think it's the opposite. With exception to startups like Bun, it's big businesses that can marshall enough financial justification to do high-performance rewrites and maintain custom code.

A common complaint on HN is bloated web performance. Surely we don't think the web is bloated because of too much custom code as opposed to too many off-the-shelf components?

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

#87

Post by toolslive »

rahkiin wrote: post #81
metalliqaz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally feel this comment, myself being a corporate drone that has to deal with this software. Between disk encryption, anti virus, IT asset management, data custody tracking, etc; my PC is as slow as molasses. Unfortunately I think its slow in a different way that low-spec machines are slow. Mine is very slow on IO ops, but I have 32GB of RAM and a 20-core i7, so plenty of resources available even after all the BS…

I could use some tips on talking with IT about this as it cripples work performance

You think it's IT pushing this? They are just executing orders.

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

#88

Post by trealira »

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…

Functional programmers have long worked to improve the compiler optimization of functional language implementations. This is how we got innovations like the continuation passing style (first used for compiling Scheme), deforestation, defunctionalization, tail call elimination, and strictness analysis (for lazy languages like Haskell).

Also, a lot of literature on improving garbage collection came from trying to improve the speed of a functional language like Lisp or Standard ML.

It seems to me that functional programmers tend to care more about optimization than e.g. Python or Ruby developers, because functional programming has a long history of being perceived as slow and they want to change it. Scheme, OCaml, Standard ML, and Haskell all have implementations that perform well and compile to assembly.

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

#89

Post by Euphorbium »

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.

The issue is not the difference in machines, the issue is that I need to run multiple apps and not just dedicate all of the resources of my machine to your app.
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