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Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

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Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#171

Post by SkyPuncher »

constantcrying wrote: post #149

Again and again people complain about this. But it remains a fact that essentially nobody actually wants this. Developers certainly like to have their completely integrated, connected and universal computing platform (the web). And users do not seem to particularly care about performance as long as it is good enough . And that is exactly the standard that is set, software is allowed to be so bad that it doesn't reall…

Yep. The most successful startup I worked at had a SPA that downloaded 5MB bundle and preloaded a bunch of data. Took nearly 10 seconds to startup.

Nobody complained about that. In fact, few people complained about a few portions of the app that had abysmal performance. It often wasn’t until 60 second load times that customers started complaining.

They still raved and raved about that software because it solved an extremely valuable problem for them. A job that took literally a week could now be done in minutes.

As the space heated up, we needed to improve some things, but most people literally did not care. It would always be stack ranked last in the list.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#172

Post by wvenable »

alerighi wrote: post #64
stephc_int13 wrote: post #20

My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it. Software has been freeriding on hardware improvements for a few decades, especially on web and desktop apps. Moore's law has been a blessing and a curse. The software you use today was written by people who learned their craft while this free-ride was still ful…

The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year, yet software are more and more heavy. For example just in 2010 a Linux distribution with a DE just started did consume 100Mb of RAM, an optimized version 60Mb of RAM. I remember it perfectly. I had 2Gb of RAM and did not have even a swap partition. Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is…

> The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year

I think that is some kind of fallacy. We are doing the same things but the quality of those things is vastly different. I collect vintage computers and I think you'd be surprised how limited we were while doing the same things. I wouldn't want to go back.

Although I will say your experience with Windows is different than mine. On all my machines, regardless of specs, start up is fast so the point where I don't even think about it.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#173

Post by mihaaly »

lr4444lr wrote: post #8

I think about this a lot, and the conclusion I've come to is that the market (simply meaning the popularity) rewards features and intuitive UI above everything else. I think we've been on this trajectory for some time: getting users with less and less actual computer literacy to do more and more with computers.

I wonder if market rules of satisfying user needs and demands is operational here still instead of shoving down things of user's throats ... actually no need to shove, they swallow anything shiny or coming with loud fanfare. It is spectacular what users are willing to work with, wrapping their world around the needs of the poorly made and sometimes even offensive software ...

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#174

Post by jwells89 »

passion__desire wrote: post #36
a2128 wrote: post #14

I may be way off-base here but this is what I imagine the problem is: 1. Company executive decides their developers need top-of-the-line hardware to remain competitive in today's market 2. Developers make web apps on their company-provided M5 Ultra Pro Max 128GB RAM powerhouse laptop 3. They never test it on their father's old 2010 family PC, or at least they don't test often/thoroughly enough to realize many parts a…

Related point, do google android engineers dogfood android phones to themselves? I guess most of them would be Apple users.

Not a Google engineer, but I do keep around a device that represents “potato” specs that I test against when doing Android development. Not a perfect solution since there’s a bevy of old/low end SoCs with varying performance characteristics, but I figure it’s better than what many are undoubtedly doing which is testing against their newish flagship and calling it a day.

I used to do the same on iOS, but came to find that performance differences on older devices there generally weren’t nearly as severe and that iOS users as a whole tend to use newer devices. When combined with reasonably well written Swift, performance on old devices generally isn’t a problem.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#175

Post by rumad »

egypturnash wrote: post #165

“My father told me he wanted Microsoft Word on his laptop. So I told him to use Google Docs instead. When that turned out to suck, I installed Libre Office instead.” Why didn’t you just, like, get him Word? Why did you make him try to use a shitty web app that assumes everyone’s computer is brand new, then install an open-source program that’s going to be constantly playing catch-up with Word’s updates and may cause…

My dad didn't want to pay for the Office. I might ended my story badly. Sorry about that. But, I don't agree with that the SaaS is not related. It is. API optimization is also important and it can directly affect the performance of web apps and even native apps.

Update: I updated the article.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#176

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

egypturnash wrote: post #165

“My father told me he wanted Microsoft Word on his laptop. So I told him to use Google Docs instead. When that turned out to suck, I installed Libre Office instead.” Why didn’t you just, like, get him Word? Why did you make him try to use a shitty web app that assumes everyone’s computer is brand new, then install an open-source program that’s going to be constantly playing catch-up with Word’s updates and may cause…

Aren't Microsoft trying their best to turn Word (and the rest of Office) into a shitty web app?

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#177

Post by mihaaly »

Zpalmtree wrote: post #136

Dude just increase your development costs 10x because apps sometimes run slow

Perhap we should compare the cost of development - and maintenance - for an efficient classic software and a bloated and modern one once ... ; ))

(probably the cost of making an ancient Word and the newest one... : )) but there could be lots of other examples of 'modern' ones made along current trends vs. similar feature set classic ones, I wonder how this cost characteristic would play out .... : ) )

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#178

Post by rumad »

KayL wrote: post #123

Wait, is it true? Did you encounter a bug? or browser extensions issues? It may not be as efficient as native, but I downloaded some sample files and repeated them until hit Google Docs limits. It is about 450 pages with some images. It is smooth and usable. There's zero delay. (and only 1000MB ram usage with many broswer extensions enabled. I think it's fair...)

The doc file has images, and some simple tables but mostly texts.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#179

Post by bobajeff »

jcelerier wrote: post #25
s1k3s wrote: post #6

I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.

whenever I do native (native as in, compiled without going through some bytecode / VM / interpreter ...) apps for mac / windows / linux I don't have to do any of this, I just use Qt

What about code signing. Won't people that run your programs want to do so without the OS claiming it will harm their computer?
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