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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

#231

Post by alightsoul »

jbstack wrote: post #225
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…

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.

Canva replaced PowerPoint. Canva is cloud based and PowerPoint is not. There's so many apps that are cloud only so that corporate it no longer has to manage installations and users don't need to ask IT for permission anymore. I think SaaS doesn't really work without the cloud, you could technically do what adobe does but why bother with app distribution and windows' quirks. Cloud based web apps are write once, run anywhere come true with no installation required. Cloud based is more convenient for the user and the developer, at the cost of app runtime speed

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

#232

Post by otterley »

hsn915 wrote: post #53
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…

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

It isn’t, but at the same time, smart hackers were working with highly constrained PC hardware in the 1980s and early 1990s and were cranking surprisingly good performance out of it. Folklore.org has plenty of stories about it, and John Carmack’s early career history is very impressive. We mustn’t forget the demo scene hackers either.

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

#233

Post by rahkiin »

raincole wrote: post #211
rfgplk wrote: post #210

LLMs have essentially made any language above the C++/Rust systems level tier obsolete. The only reason you picked a language like C# or Python is often out of convenience of having a broad ecosystem or due to the lower level languages being too hard to master, with too many footguns. The tradeoff being is that you got a less performant implement, while being easier to write. Nowadays, those arguments are dead. LLMs…

Yeah, let LLM write C++ when your team have cannot comfortably write C++ in the first place. This is surely a frankly safter way than human-written C# and Python.

Yes indeed, that will be a much better road to a durable, maintainable, secure and agile product than focusing on product goals in a higher level language with a framework.

When will we start using LLMs to write my web backend directly in UEFI and assembler? (Although uefi is an OS, so maybe more fair to exit the boot services)

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

#234

Post by arjie »

Nevermark wrote: post #228
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…

Perhaps the real tragedy is not the animation. It is the fact that previously keystrokes would register even if the animation had not completed and now they do not. Interaction once you've entered a new mode should be instantaneous. Instead we are faced with inputs going neither to the old app nor to the new app. In the prior world, I could do the gesture and type the letters and hit Enter and the animation would not interrupt me from getting to my destination. Now I simply and suffer the ignominy of a software system that does not care about my niche needs and is nonetheless beyond my present ability to modify while retaining all else.

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

#238

Post by swiftcoder »

andersmurphy wrote: post #202
alightsoul wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience the main driver of latency is not ping time, but how long the server takes to process the request.

I think a lot of the time when people say the network is slow. They really mean their backend is slow. With a fast backend ~1-5ms response times (not even that fast). Streaming compression over something like SSE to keep your response sub 1kb packet (roughly an ethernet MTU). With a push based model, pushing data to a user is half their RTT latency. They will only experience their full RTT on actions they trigger. No…

> With a fast backend ~1-5ms response times (not even that fast).

Even though benchmarks suggest this sort of performance should be trivial, most real-world servers I have interacted with do not reliably managed to process a request, make a roundtrip to the DB, and return a response in <5ms

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

#239

Post by jshier »

Nevermark wrote: post #228
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…

Making animations faster is one of the main reasons why, despite all the glass effect rendering, the 26 Apple OSes can feel faster than their previous versions. (Not always, of course.) They simply shortened the animations. The 27 versions do the same thing. Of course, this doesn't help all interactions, but it definitely improves the first impression.

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

#240

Post by bcjones524 »

jcelerier wrote: post #164
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…

I have a new laptop with a rtx 5090. Opening any GL context takes more than half a second. There's tons of things that can be optimized and are pretty far from web.

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