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There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

danluu.com

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

#221

Post by arjie »

I understand now that most software is slow because of co-tenancy reasons requiring controlling resources or simply because they're safely insulated from competition. e.g. GitHub is the former: you can give yourself a git host and CI/CD system that is much higher quality by yourself since you're probably not using its social features. I think things like Apple's five-finger inward gesture are the latter. Once you could do it and start typing but nowadays it needs to render the animation etc. before keystrokes register. This software is slow because you cannot replace it in MacOS.

But all these things will change in time. Hell is other people's software.

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

#222

Post by userbinator »

hunterpayne wrote: post #197

"LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly." This person doesn't understand how to make efficient code. I can write code in almost any language (with a couple of exceptions) that outperforms "super-optimized assembly". Writing efficient code isn't about the language, and often isn't about the best algorithms either (but sometimes it is). Its a…

Also, LLMs are terrible at optimizing memory utilization.

I've already posted this elsewhere, but here it is again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226923

A vibe-coded OS that runs on an 8088 with 256KB of RAM.

As proof, I'm can literally feel the web getting slower and I bet many others feel this as well.

"It's not the tool, it's how you use it..."

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

#223

Post by ntoskrnl_exe »

ehnto wrote: post #44

One of the biggest causes of slowness is just waiting for web requests. The fact that so much software is either online or built using the same stack even if it isn't, puts all that software in this blocked/waiting state constantly while using it. Anyone not in the US feels this even more since so much online is US hosted, 300ms for every little interaction adds up quick. If your software has the affordance of a wait…

Anyone not in the US feels this even more since so much online is US hosted, 300ms for every little interaction adds up quick.

Don’t know about that, pretty much everything is hosted on Cloudflare, Azure or S3 these days and all of them have at least one CDN on each continent.

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

#224

Post by chii »

stickfigure wrote: post #175
za3faran wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds very interesting. Which JVM profiler do you use?

Not OP, but I went through this last week. I (ok, codex) optimized a hot path in some Java code from ~350ms to ~60ms, which made a substantial difference in "is this whole business going to work". My Java profiling knowledge is... let's call it "antique". I was really not looking forward to ramping back up for this work. Turns out, I didn't have to do any of it. The LLM chose the tools (flight recorder) and even buil…

> the other half were definitely "wow" moments.

do you have some samples? It would be interesting to learn what it might be.

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

#225

Post by jbstack »

alightsoul wrote: post #184
hsn915 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not very hard to engineer software with these two constraints at the same time: * Must feel very responsive * Network requests can take up to 500ms end to end

That's why phones and windows use animations. You can also use intersitials related to the product you sell. Users are usually fine seeing many changes on the screen quickly because it gives the impression that stuff is happening on the background. For example in the interstitial, use an animation that takes up a small portion of the screen and not just a simple spinner or loading icon. Something more complicated wit…

If your app absolutely must rely on the cloud for every one of its interactions, then fine. If not, you're just applying band-aids to a problem of your own making. Many apps could easily be local only, or local first. If you're not constantly accessing the network for information which could be stored locally, then you don't need to hide your app's slowness behind animations.

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

#226

Post by ddejohn »

hunterpayne wrote: post #197

"LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly." This person doesn't understand how to make efficient code. I can write code in almost any language (with a couple of exceptions) that outperforms "super-optimized assembly". Writing efficient code isn't about the language, and often isn't about the best algorithms either (but sometimes it is). Its a…

The author was paraphrasing a tweet written by somebody else:

> The other day, I saw a viral tweet saying [...]

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

#227

Post by spockz »

Kuyawa wrote: post #146

Next time you ask your AI of choice to build an app, please tell them to use plain language without frameworks at all and keep modules to a minimum (ie. node express, ejs and pg, nothing else) and you will see a huuuuge difference

Basically you are telling the agent to inline those frameworks. It has access to the frameworks, their functionality, and how they implemented things, combined with countless examples on how to use those frameworks.

If only we had a sufficiently smart™ compiler, it could do the inkling, dead code elimination, and WPO across the application. (Oh we do have that, as long as you don’t write in JavaScript…)

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

#228

Post by Nevermark »

arjie wrote: post #221

I understand now that most software is slow because of co-tenancy reasons requiring controlling resources or simply because they're safely insulated from competition. e.g. GitHub is the former: you can give yourself a git host and CI/CD system that is much higher quality by yourself since you're probably not using its social features. I think things like Apple's five-finger inward gesture are the latter. Once you cou…

> Apple's five-finger inward gesture are the opposite. Once you could do it and start typing but nowadays it needs to render the animation

There is no technical reason that animation should take that long.

Someone said, "good enough" and let it be visibly slow. The reasons for that could be anything, including non-performant code in dependencies, written by other people. But it just does not take much computing power by today's standards to composite code-generated animation.

Somehow, despite year after year of percentage-speed hardware improvements, there are cultural and structural reasons people ship code visibly slower than it needs to be. And faster compute appears to be irrelevant.

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

#229

Post by alightsoul »

ddejohn wrote: post #216
alightsoul wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why phones and windows use animations. You can also use intersitials related to the product you sell. Users are usually fine seeing many changes on the screen quickly because it gives the impression that stuff is happening on the background. For example in the interstitial, use an animation that takes up a small portion of the screen and not just a simple spinner or loading icon. Something more complicated wit…

> Users are usually fine seeing many changes on the screen quickly because it gives the impression that stuff is happening on the background This gave me a chuckle because I personally hate things like watching the browser jump through 50+ redirects when logging into a website.

My bad, I mean the interstitial. Like it should stay for at least a second to not make it jarring. People believe computers need to think so you can't make things too fast either. Not the interstitial and not the app either, to the point you sometimes have to deliberately slow down the app, add latency to make people trust it because it "gives the computer time to think"

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

#230

Post by amarant »

I was thinking about this the other day, but along a slightly different path. I realised there is no need to use web technology to provide native experiences anymore. Bundling a web browser was always a way to ship native apps to multiple platforms with minimal effort, but these days prompting up an actual native client for each platform is already accessible even to small shops!

That's probably one of the biggest sources of software slowness, and we can just stop using it now, with almost no trade-off. Neat!

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