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How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

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Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#131

Post by vendiddy »

The_Colonel wrote: post #112
tetris11 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder about this often. Are these new UI frameworks iterating upwards towards some unknown featureset archetype, where if given another 10-20 years, the designers will say "Okay, we've reached diminishing feature returns, let's pack it up and optimize" Or, are we simply re-inventing the wheel each time, where the set of features over the last few decades really haven't change that much or cycles through feature…

> Or, are we simply re-inventing the wheel each time, where the set of features over the last few decades really haven't change that much or cycles through featureset phases. The problem space is much larger now than it used to be. 20 years ago, you didn't care about things like responsive design, accessibility, fractional scaling, even internationalization was basic/non-existent. There's a long tail of features (oft…

I would expect some overhead, but none of the features you describe seem to justify performance hit apps have taken.

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#132

Post by vendiddy »

stavros wrote: post #25
eterm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all of it was, some of it was very laggy and slow. Indeed the whole OS would frequently freeze up.

Sure, but nowadays all of it is laggy and slow. I cringe every time I'm faster than Slack, a text chat program.

Yep exactly. If we're talking about a cutting-edge app, I get the sluggishness.

But IRC used to respond instantly. Feels like apps are doing roughly the same thing but more slowly despite having computers that are orders of magnitude faster.

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#133

Post by ansgri »

signaru wrote: post #128
ansgri wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately no, had no use case for it in an industry dominated by Python and C++. Wouldn't be surprised if Lazarus is very fast and pleasant to use, and I think the problem with more popular IDEs lies in underlying technology: C++ is traditionally very slow to compile and analyze, and many popular languages are too dynamic for reliable autocompletion to be feasible. When I briefly worked with C# and Java in 2000s the IDEs were very much fully functional (compared to C++ at the time), but sluggish enough to be unpleasant without a powerful PC which I did not have — and Delphi ran fast on cheap hardware.

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#134

Post by josephg »

arp242 wrote: post #106
holsta wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

According to the talk I watched, tigerbeetle makes heavy use of io_uring on linux - which isn't part of POSIX.

Adding freebsd support should be pretty easy. If it supports darwin, it'll probably already have an implementation built on top of freebsd's kqueue. Its probably just a case of wiring it up to use kqueue when built for freebsd.

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#135

Post by markus_zhang »

red_admiral wrote: post #64
josephg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that way about the old Interface Builder for macos, back in the Xcode 3.x days. VB6 was pretty good too.

Yeah, the interface builders back then are also unsurpassed to this day. Much as I have my issues with VB as a language, the way you could build a GUI with a GUI was amazing. Better still, it worked back on school computers that of course didn't have any "programming" tools, but did come with MS office and the full VB "experience" installed for some reason.

Just curious, what is preventing people from creating something similar to VB6 and Delphi in modern days? Different underlying frameworks? But I'm sure VB6 still sort of works on Windows 10 (VBA).

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#136

Post by markus_zhang »

josephg wrote: post #36
red_admiral wrote: post #31

I 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…

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…

Please do. I'm also wondering why no one created something similar to VB6 and Delphi.

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#137

Post by josephg »

vendiddy wrote: post #130
laserbeam wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah; and we have plenty of other general purpose databases which can run laps around postgres and sqlite.

There's plenty of optimisations postgres and friends leave on the table. Like, the postgres client driver could precompile queries and do query planning on behalf of the database. It would introduce some complexity, because the database would need to send information about the schema and layout at startup (and any time it changed). But that would remove a lot of unnecessary, repeated makework from the database process itself. Application servers are much easier to scale than database servers. And application servers could much more easily cache the query plan.

Weirdly, I think part of the problem is economic. I think there's a lot of very smart people around with the skills to dramatically improve the performance of databases like postgresql. Across the whole economy, it would be way cheaper to pay them to optimize the code than needing companies everywhere to rent and run additional database servers. But it might not be worth it for any individual company to fund the work themselves. Without coordination (ie, opensource funding), there's not enough money to hire performance engineers, and the work just doesn't happen.

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#138

Post by markus_zhang »

rubymamis wrote: post #57
moshegramovsky wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would draw everything myself. I wouldn't be too fast to recommend this. I have quite a lot of experience with Qt[1], and I manged to get a good look and feel across different operating systems. Yes, you'll need to customize Qt Quick components yourself. But that's easy. Also, Qt is improving its support for native components, they now support native dialogs and file pickers in Qt Quick[2]. Another important thing…

Is there a way to get a Win95 look in Win10 QT?

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#139

Post by josephg »

markus_zhang wrote: post #135
red_admiral wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the interface builders back then are also unsurpassed to this day. Much as I have my issues with VB as a language, the way you could build a GUI with a GUI was amazing. Better still, it worked back on school computers that of course didn't have any "programming" tools, but did come with MS office and the full VB "experience" installed for some reason.

Just curious, what is preventing people from creating something similar to VB6 and Delphi in modern days? Different underlying frameworks? But I'm sure VB6 still sort of works on Windows 10 (VBA).

The big problem is that nobody wants yet another platform-specific UI framework. Even Microsoft is using electron (or something like it) to build Microsoft Teams.

If you build a cross-platform UI framework, it'll probably end up looking a bit ugly and custom on every platform (eg Java Swing). Making a cross-platform UI toolkit that looks native everywhere is an insane amount of work, because different platforms have very different UI toolkits, with different built-in components and different platform conventions. This problem becomes 10x harder if you want to make it work on mobile as well.

Some people try anyway - and bless their cotton socks. But electron (and arguably Qt) are the closest we've got. And even then, most electron apps seem to be full of custom components.

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#140

Post by mwcampbell »

josephg wrote: post #36
red_admiral wrote: post #31

I 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…

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…

Do you think you'd write your 90s style widget set and desktop environment in Rust, or do you think Rust itself tends toward bloat (in non-embedded applications)? I know you use Rust in other projects, which is why I'm asking about that language specifically.
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