Easy, we would enjoy the software practices that were common with compiled languages until the mid-2010's, when people started using scripting languages for application development instead of OS scripting activities, with Zope, Django, Rails and friends, ending up in mostrosities like Electron, despite Active Desktop and XUL failure.
How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
121–130 of 161 posts
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yes, but Jevons paradox only says usage goes up. That usage could have gone to things that help with productivity of the end user rather than going to sluggish frameworks.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you happen to have any pointers or recommendations regarding C++ for desktop applications? Especially towards state-management and user-interaction? I am primarily doing game development and HPC; I am decently familiar with C++, but desktop UI has been a pain point for me so far. Most GUI tools I write in C++ are using ImGui, or they are written in C#.
Desktop UI is painful. It doesn't help that Microsoft is seems to have quite a few competing UI frameworks and technologies these days. 1. What is your goal? Do you need to run on Windows and Linux? QT isn't bad, although I personally think the UI looks a little weird. It is definitely highly opinionated and parts of it are quite strange IMHO. There's probably lots of jobs writing with QT, which might be a nice side…
I'm building a complex greenfield app in WPF, so your "Desktop UI is painful" comment does not resonate with me at all. They will have to drag me back to web development kicking and screaming. I absolutely love building UIs in this framework. No blockers, no bullshit. So fluid and easy.
Not to mention, the exact same paradigm translates to the other Microsoft desktop/mobile/x-platform frameworks, so if you insist that WPF is "old" or out of date, everything you build can be ported/refactored quite easily to the newest framework(s).
I have built non-trivial desktop apps in every framework except QT, and you would have to pry WPF from my cold dead hands.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#124I 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'm used to newer computers, so Visual Studio 2008 was my favorite Visual Studio. With VS 2010 and later, Microsoft decided to scrap the existing Win32 based UI and rewrite it in WPF, which made it take 20 seconds to start instead of less than a second. Even after it's started, it's far less responsive than 2008. If only Microsoft offered a "Visual Studio 2008 but with modern standards support" product...
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I believe you have proved my point that you're speaking of very niche examples. Even Sublime Text won't load a 100GB instantly on a normal machine. And I consider it a very well-made app. While of course there might be apps that will load such files instantly, they are highly optimized for such a task. My point is that Qt is more than enough to replace all those Electron, and other web-based apps, while performing as good or even better than native apps.
At the end of the day, Qt can also be just a wrapper for your highly optimized engine - for example, NotepadNext[1] is using the very performant Scintilla engine while its UI is written in Qt. From my (unscientific) tests, it's even vastly faster than Sublime Text.
BTW, I'm not saying that rendering and creating your own UI is always a bad idea. Many people do it because it's fun and challenging, or to push the boundaries. That's what Vjekoslav Krajačić is doing with Disk Voyager - writing a file explorer in C from scratch[2][3]. But for many people, that's too much. I believe Qt C++ with QML is the best combo for most people, for most applications.
[1] https://github.com/dail8859/NotepadNext
[3]https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/103b9fy/disk_v...
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#126I'm not sure I understand the premise, because CPU speeds were 20x slower. Just go back a decade or two. They weren't some halcyon days of bug-free software back then, quite the opposite.
Software wasn't bug-free, but it was responsive.
Like when you were booting windows and waiting an extra 3 minutes for your single processor CPU to finish all the startup tasks before doing anything else?
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I’m talking about the mess of electron and friends. I’ve spoken to engineers who work on it. From their point of view, it’s the only sane way to build software that works across multiple operating systems.
The nice thing about windows and macOS back in the day was that the programs we ran were all written with the same native UI toolkit. All the controls matched between applications. Applications were small and efficient - binary sizes and memory usage were in the megabyte range. Any program written like that today starts up instantly, and is incredibly responsive.
But last I checked, Hello world in electron is ginormous. It uses about 100mb of memory. It takes time to start up. Vscode and Spotify are great but they don’t look or feel native. It is legitimately great that people now ship apps for Linux. But we’ve lost platform cohesion in the trade.
So, so what if tigerbeetle is written for Linux? I’m ok with the developers choosing not to pay the cross platform tax.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Every IDE is a sluggish piece of garbage after Delphi 7.
I'm curious if you've used Lazarus and what you think about it. I have not used enough similar IDEs to compare it (or maybe just forgotten how it was) and didn't have access to Borland tools back in the day. One crazy thing I remember about Lazarus is how it can compile the IDE quite fast (given its codebase size) when installing plug-ins.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I believe you have proved my point that you're speaking of very niche examples. Even Sublime Text won't load a 100GB instantly on a normal machine. And I consider it a very well-made app. While of course there might be apps that will load such files instantly, they are highly optimized for such a task. My point is that Qt is more than enough to replace all those Electron, and other web-based apps, while performing as…
If everything you do stays in the rails of QT you're going to be fine. But you try to do something simple like load a 2GB file and everything starts to fall to pieces, then you're going to assume the people that wrote this are super clever and that a 2GB file is too complicated, too niche, too hard of a problem, it needs to be "highly optimised", etc.
The reality is QT/whatever program/framework is doing 100 things you don't care about when loading/rendering a file. If we only care about 1 thing we can do that much better because we don't care about the 100 other things our naïve code we wrote in 5 minutes outperforms the standard element by a factor of 1,000.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I saw a talk about tigerbeetle the other day - which is a small, fast database for handling financial transactions that apparenty runs orders of magnitude faster than Postgres. The database binary has no dependencies and compiles to 500kb. Its authors were joking they could distribute it on floppy disks if they wanted. It’s written in Zig, not C. But that style of programming is still available to us if we want it. E…
Keep in mind, the thing that matters most for tigerbeetle’s speed is they are domain specific. They know exactly upfront how data looks like. They don’t have to be general purpose. The style of programming does work for general purpose computing, but their requirements enable a significant % of “orders of magnitude faster than postgress”.
While your take makes sense, I feel like even general purpose programming frameworks should be orders of magnitude faster for what they are doing.