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There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

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Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#71

Post by Grimburger »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #48

Feel like this is the equivalent of a traffic engineer standing at the grand opening of the 5th lane for the highway saying there’s no reason for traffic to be slow anymore. That is, there’s a misunderstanding of why software (traffic) was slow in the first place, and it has nothing to do with our ability to generate code (number of lanes), even if that code is “high quality”.

Still a struggle to get coworkers to write docs or tests despite it being effortless.

At the end of the day its a mindset.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#72

Post by aw1621107 »

archargelod wrote: post #63
y1n0 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all about the test suite. The test suite becomes an executable specification, and the better the spec, the better the results you can get from AI.

How do you write a spec for correctness? Only the small and unimpressive programs can be checked exhaustively.

> Only the small and unimpressive programs can be checked exhaustively.

Even if you assume that statement is true, there are techniques other than exhaustive checking/model checking. Proof assistants/theorem provers/etc. like Rocq/Isabelle/Lean are quite capable of formally verifying programs without needing to exhaustively explore the search space.

I'd question the accuracy of that statement in general as well; model checkers like CBMC/TLA+ are handy for proving properties about interesting systems. The latter, for example, sees use for verifying concurrent/distributed systems, which I think can be reasonably described as more than "small and unimpressive"

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#73

Post by mccoyb »

Aurornis wrote: post #68
mccoyb wrote: post #55

Here's this boiled down: > A stochastic search process with an executable optimization objective over space of programs S can only maintain or improve the objective This is superoptimization. We've known this since the 80s (Massalin, STOKE is more recent: https://github.com/StanfordPL/stoke ) The only novelty is that the proposer is now way better with LMs. Further, there's a large number of reasons for software writ…

> - The knobs you'd need to get serious performance are nearly unreachable in languages which LMs are good at (even Rust requires a discipline that the default language doesn't enforce). When you drop into the lower realms, you're trading consumption context for access to these levers. The levers are also "soft": you find yourself writing a bunch of skills, and tools to try and enforce the discipline. Hasn’t been my…

That's fair for a well-scoped subroutine: what I meant is that if you ask an agent to write a compiler and let it rip for a few days, you are going to be spending a few more days correcting the default behaviors in the distribution, which often do not tend towards hardware-oriented design.

To correct those behaviors, you're going to write tools and skills, and that's going to help, but it is still clear that you are fighting the distribution (today).

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#74

Post by efsavage »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #48

Feel like this is the equivalent of a traffic engineer standing at the grand opening of the 5th lane for the highway saying there’s no reason for traffic to be slow anymore. That is, there’s a misunderstanding of why software (traffic) was slow in the first place, and it has nothing to do with our ability to generate code (number of lanes), even if that code is “high quality”.

Sorry I can't resist the pedantry but a traffic engineer knows better than anyone that adding a 5th lane (often even a 4th) won't improve traffic except in fairly specific circumstances. :D

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#75

Post by noosphr »

y1n0 wrote: post #29
newsomix9xl wrote: post #14

One article said secure software was here because of AI, this one says it can now be performant. Yet when I ask for code it writes, by default, both slow and insecure code that mostly works. Kinda. As I try to get AI to rewrite it into more secure, less bloated and optimized code is when it starts to randomly crash. Then I read articles about how AI is "moving too fast" and cry.

It's all about the test suite. The test suite becomes an executable specification, and the better the spec, the better the results you can get from AI.

It really isn't.

It's s about subpar models trained on subpar data doing subpar work.

The only reason why anyone takes it seriously is that we've had a glut of subpar developers for 30 years so it all balances out in the end.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#76

Post by WCSTombs »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #13

Well, at least with the RAM crunch that the AI boom has caused, I hope there will be some sort of pressure to write efficient software, otherwise device manufacturers are quite fucked.

Yeah, I've been thinking this as well. I have some optimism, but not with high confidence. The exponentially increasing power of computing hardware up until this point is often cited as the reason performance optimization has been sidelined in the software industry. Now that there's a definite hiccup in that trend, I'm hoping programmers will remember that software actually can be fast and memory-efficient, and that poor design choices that lead to bad performance are exactly that, a choice.

The author of the article definitely seems to think LLMs are what enables this to happen, but I personally am much more skeptical of that. I think what it really needs is bringing engineering back into software, not just throwing LLMs at it and calling it a day.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#77

Post by qball »

raincole wrote: post #10

100% sure software in the coming years will just feel slower and slower.

So long as the way to improve software is "just stack another VM on it", software will continue to get slower.

Cutting edge development practice in 2025 was using a big JavaScript framework (not quite VMs, but they inherently strain the environments they run in).

That code is run by the JavaScript interpreter VM, which is running in the browser (another VM), which was (in whole or part) written in a managed language (another VM).

That program runs on top of the OS (another VM), which runs on another VM (the default hypervisor for Windows 10/11, or the desktop environment for Linux/macOS).

Each VM lets you have an entirely new managed programming environment- you have a new program that lets you write software even quicker than before- but that comes at the expense of memory usage and (most importantly) latency. Which is why it takes modern systems a few seconds to figure out you pressed a button in your React application that's running in an isolated browser instance consuming 1GB of RAM, where systems in the 90s were instant by comparison even though they had a fraction of the processing power.

It's conceivable that in 10-20 years, LLMs could be used as VMs in and of themselves, which will still likely be using 2020s development languages. So your software is going to require at least 128GB of RAM to compile, use another 32GB to run, and it'll take twice as long to respond to clicking a button.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#78

Post by petra »

newsomix9xl wrote: post #14

One article said secure software was here because of AI, this one says it can now be performant. Yet when I ask for code it writes, by default, both slow and insecure code that mostly works. Kinda. As I try to get AI to rewrite it into more secure, less bloated and optimized code is when it starts to randomly crash. Then I read articles about how AI is "moving too fast" and cry.

Regarding speed - now it takes much less learning to use a fast web framework(like Meteor), this means web based software will be more performant.

Regarding security - i wonder: can we develop a framework that is responsible to 100% of the security, with zero responsibility for security on the app developer?

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#79

Post by etoxin »

newsomix9xl wrote: post #14

One article said secure software was here because of AI, this one says it can now be performant. Yet when I ask for code it writes, by default, both slow and insecure code that mostly works. Kinda. As I try to get AI to rewrite it into more secure, less bloated and optimized code is when it starts to randomly crash. Then I read articles about how AI is "moving too fast" and cry.

[dead]

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#80

Post by panzi »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #48

Feel like this is the equivalent of a traffic engineer standing at the grand opening of the 5th lane for the highway saying there’s no reason for traffic to be slow anymore. That is, there’s a misunderstanding of why software (traffic) was slow in the first place, and it has nothing to do with our ability to generate code (number of lanes), even if that code is “high quality”.

What's the public transport of software development? Where can I get good train service here?
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