Didn't we have just that?, i'm sure there are tons of history that can fill in any gaps you may have in what it was like.
How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
101–110 of 161 posts
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
if [ "$os" = "Darwin" ]; then arch="universal" os="macos" elif [ "$os" = "Linux" ]; then os="linux" else echo "Unsupported OS." exit 1 fi This is nothing to emulate.
Why not? Does everything really need to be built in a cross platform way? I feel like that’s how we got into this mess.
Yes, bugs are often found by running the same code on similar but not identical platforms. We've had this conversation multiple times.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28978086
What mess are we in because of POSIX?
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#103One way to answer this question is to look at the software produced when clock speeds were 20x slower. The limitations, and features we had then are a minimum starting point. So I'm thinking around the era of a 486 100mhz machine. We'd have at least that (think mylti-player Doom and Quake era as a starting point.) We had Windows, preemptive multi threading, networks, internet, large hard drives, pretty much the base…
Even modern cellphone chips a far more than 20x the speed of a 100Mhz 486 outside of extremely pathological workloads. At minimum we’re still talking 64 Bit chips. However, IMO simply thinking in terms of actual chips that existed isn’t that interesting. What would computing look like if the PIII was a 12 CPU at 500 MHz. That’s a little closer to 5% of modern chips and something nobody worked with. Alternatively what…
I can't buy into the idea of 486s but also SSDs. Why doesn't the speed limitation of CPUs extend to controllers, busses, SoC, transistor sizes, etc? If the 2GHZ CPU is now 10Mhz, then presumably the memory bus is no longer 100Mhz, but 5Mhz.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
if [ "$os" = "Darwin" ]; then arch="universal" os="macos" elif [ "$os" = "Linux" ]; then os="linux" else echo "Unsupported OS." exit 1 fi This is nothing to emulate.
That's just the codepath from bootstrap.sh that downloads the binaries. I don't know if it will compile and run on, say, FreeBSD. It's quite possible no one tried.
I did, but there are literal compile-time checks for various platforms.
pub fn monotonic(self: *Self) u64 {
const m = blk: {
if (is_windows) break :blk monotonic_windows();
if (is_darwin) break :blk monotonic_darwin();
if (is_linux) break :blk monotonic_linux();
@compileError("unsupported OS");
};Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#105I feel like every time CPU speeds double, someone comes up with a Web UI framework that has twice as much indirection. With 20x slower compute, we might not have UIs that fire off an event and maybe trigger an asynchronous network request every time you type a character in a box, for example. Windows 95 could do a decently responsive desktop UI on an 80386. Coding was a lot less elegant in one way - C code that retur…
It’s kinda like adding lanes on the freeway: for a time traffic is nice but people get used to it and then more people start driving and it becomes just as congested as it was before.
Good observation. I believe the name for that is "induced demand".
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just the codepath from bootstrap.sh that downloads the binaries. I don't know if it will compile and run on, say, FreeBSD. It's quite possible no one tried.
I did, but there are literal compile-time checks for various platforms. pub fn monotonic(self: *Self) u64 { const m = blk: { if (is_windows) break :blk monotonic_windows(); if (is_darwin) break :blk monotonic_darwin(); if (is_linux) break :blk monotonic_linux(); @compileError("unsupported OS"); };
That genuinely seems platform-specific. Should be easy enough to write a patch to add support for $other_system.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you write your own UI, you get used to quickly + easily being able to create custom elements that do/behave exactly as you want and even iterate on those elements to get the best user experience. Lets say I want to control pan/tilt/zoom/focus/aperture/etc of a remote camera. If I ask lets say an expert in UI framework Z to do it, it will take them 10x longer to create a very painful experience using standard ele…
Sounds like a very specific example. But I'm still unconvinced - what will make this particular UI slow using Qt? The camera view? My Qt note-taking app is faster and more responsive than native apps like Apple Notes and best-in-class Bike Outliner. Both in loading speed (4x) and resizing (with word-wrapping) of a large text file (War and Peace).
Maybe the user wants to do real time exposure/color correction, so you want to minimise the number of frames from the moment of the input to seeing the output. To do it properly the user also would want to see analysis graphs on the screen on the same frame that's being displayed? And do this for 10 cameras at once?
Maybe your definition of "fast" for a large text file is War and Peace, and mine is multiple 1/10/100 GB text files that you want to search/interact with in realtime at a keystroke level.
I've probably written 100+ completely different "very specific examples" in very different industries, because that's where you can create much better experiences.
Generally your expectations are based around what you get as standard from the library, but if you want to get a much better experience then it immediately becomes a lot more difficult.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#108I feel like every time CPU speeds double, someone comes up with a Web UI framework that has twice as much indirection. With 20x slower compute, we might not have UIs that fire off an event and maybe trigger an asynchronous network request every time you type a character in a box, for example. Windows 95 could do a decently responsive desktop UI on an 80386. Coding was a lot less elegant in one way - C code that retur…
It’s kinda like adding lanes on the freeway: for a time traffic is nice but people get used to it and then more people start driving and it becomes just as congested as it was before.
Its a form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s an evolving economics problem. Very few (I mean super extremely few) people really know how the web UI works without a framework and there is no incentive to know this because the more skilled a person becomes in that regard the less employable they become. As a 15 year former JavaScript developer I can see that things are changing in this regard with hiring slowing down, but there remains close to no incentive…
Doesn't it make you the go-to person when something goes wrong, and someone has to debug it? My own experience from a time at a SpringBoot/iBATIS/Hibernate etc. shop (so server-side not UI side) is that it's all well and good running on "rocket fuel" as the consultants say, until something goes wrong. Then at some point you need the person who understands HTTP and SQL and other antique stuff to diagnose the problem,…
There are people who do care about that, but it’s astonishingly rare. Just consider it abandoned knowledge. Most of the people who continue to care about these things do so in open source contributions far away from their employment.
As a proof occasionally somebody will post something on HN about performance (asking for guidance, showing off a refactor, claiming performance is a critical must, whatever). I show them how to achieve load times of less than 100ms on a OS like GUI with full state restoration and the feedback is always the same. Either they can’t hire anybody who is capable of following that guidance or the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Nothing in the guidance is challenging. It’s just not framework bullshit.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#110I feel like every time CPU speeds double, someone comes up with a Web UI framework that has twice as much indirection. With 20x slower compute, we might not have UIs that fire off an event and maybe trigger an asynchronous network request every time you type a character in a box, for example. Windows 95 could do a decently responsive desktop UI on an 80386. Coding was a lot less elegant in one way - C code that retur…
VB6 had intellisense. sure it was much less powerful than today's, but you had a project with a dozen classes, and when you typed the name of an instance variable and then hit ".", it would immediately show you a list of accessible members of the according class and update the preselected member as you started typing. This was absolutely immediate, on a 133mhz machine with 32mb RAM. Even on 66mhz it was still usable.
I remember switching to VB.NET on a 600mhz machine and the IDE was a sluggish piece of garbage.