Where in that stack is the biggest loss of performance? DOM? Javascript? Browser? Or is it because everything needs to sync to the cloud as you edit it?
Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
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Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#12Yes because we promote blog posts on “idiomatic ruby” and “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. “Performance is less important than dev time”. We used to have developers who took less time and wrote better code.
I dont agree, there is way more help in terms of writing efficient code today than there was back in time, ive seen horrible code from that time which would not have been produced today.
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#13We recently moved an old page from plain html and everything generates by the backend to react and we had a drop down take several seconds to open with a thousand or so items in it. Was like 100ms to open the entire page before.
It was suggested to only display the first 100 items and let the user type in 3 characters until it started rendering.
Unfortunately this is the reality for many these days.
Of course instead we just fixed the shitty react code and it rendered instantly.
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#14I may be way off-base here but this is what I imagine the problem is:
1. Company executive decides their developers need top-of-the-line hardware to remain competitive in today's market
2. Developers make web apps on their company-provided M5 Ultra Pro Max 128GB RAM powerhouse laptop
3. They never test it on their father's old 2010 family PC, or at least they don't test often/thoroughly enough to realize many parts are broken or unusable
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#15In the early 90s, I believe MS Word came on a few floppy disks and the main executable was 2MB. It ran fine on a 16Mhz 386 with a total of 2MB RAM (let that sink in!) It did pretty much everything it does now, only lacked a grammar checker. (WordPerfect had one.) Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained? We not only lost the way, we don’t even know the destination any more.
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Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#16The same techniques that native apps use to process large documents should be possible in JS/WASM land, no? Given, you probably won't reach native performance, but it seems to me a snappy text editing experience even for large documents should be perfectly doable using web tech.
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#17I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.
You can't use Qt?
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#18People shit on web devs, but lower lvl things arent better either - try compiling llvm
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#19We aren't making software. Where making features (and bugs) for the next Friday deadline.
Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
#20My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it.
Software has been freeriding on hardware improvements for a few decades, especially on web and desktop apps.
Moore's law has been a blessing and a curse.
The software you use today was written by people who learned their craft while this free-ride was still fully ongoing.