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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?

#381

Post by saagarjha »

dhosek wrote: post #261
varispeed wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One off few hundred or few thousands is nothing in comparison to 30% tax. That said, I don't know about Mac, but you can build apps using free tools - maybe in not as convenient way, but certainly you can. I remember, because I was someone who couldn't afford Visual Studio licence and had to make do with GNU tools. The greed of these companies put me off from developing anything.

In the early 90s, you could expect to pay anywhere from $200–1000 for a good C/C++ compiler. Now it’s free. The 30% tax, as many people have already pointed out, is only if you want to sell through the store. Back in the 90s, if you were selling software, downloading off the net wasn’t really a thing yet and you could easily expect to end up giving up 40–60% of the retail sales price and out of what was left you were…

It’s free because of free software, not because of platforms that used to sell these tools.

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

#382

Post by raincole »

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.

It's either me having reading comprehension issue, or it's surprisingly unclear which certificate I need to buy to publish an app on Microsoft Store and what the minimum cost is.

Considering the whole point to have Windows is to use apps I'd expect they made the process super smooth.

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

#383

Post by VelesDude »

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…

The area I feel this difference the most is when you use software that didn't fall into this trap. Things like MYOB EXO/CRM, SAP ERP systems have code bases stretching back decades that innovate at a glacial pace. As such it is basically 2000's tech that we are forced to still use and that has turned into its big advantage.

It is always fun to put up the task managed on these to see them using 20-30MB of RAM with a large part of that being the current data base loaded in.

VLC & Blender are other examples of this.

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

#384

Post by fauigerzigerk »

eviks wrote: post #339
_aavaa_ wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter offer: the tooling is ultimately for their benefit. They need the apps to make their platform what it is.

They ultimately need money, not apps or platforms, so this is exactly how they achieve that ultimate benefit, no top-level logic will just justify free here

>no top-level logic will just justify free here

Not true. The technical term for "ultimately need money" is discounted future cash flow. It is impossible to know for sure what price you have to charge for any particular item at any given time in order to optimise for this metric.

Realistically, the answer depends on the state of competition between platforms. We all know what that state is.

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

#385

Post by worksonmine »

hn_version_0023 wrote: post #148
Rochus wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The alternative that exists today that I can buy and all the apps I need for work will actually exist and function correctly is called…

The hardware is difficult but people are working on it. If you really want all firmware to be open old Thinkpads are popular but I've never tried it myself. And Linux/*BSD should be your OS. I've been using Linux for over a decade and don't miss anything.

If your work mandates something you can't solve with Linux the issue is with your work and you should push to change that.

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

#386

Post by fuzzfactor »

asp_hornet wrote: post #254
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…

> path of least resistance Great take. It feels like the path of least resistance peppered with obscene amounts of resume driven development. Complexity in all the wrong places.

>Did we lose our way

It wasn't supposed to be like this but it looks like most people never have found the way by now.

So, misguided efforts, wasted resources, and technical debt piles up like never before, and at an even faster rate than efficiency of the software itself declines on the surface.

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

#387

Post by noahtallen »

ponector wrote: post #94
tomsmeding wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not discounting your lament about memory use, this caught my eye: > I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster! Sure, Windows has grown a lot in size (as have other OSes). But startup is typically bounded by disk random access, not compute power or memory (granted, I don't use Windows, if 8GB is not enough to boot the OS then things are much worse…

But that is true. My laptop with windows, i7, nvme, 32gb ram now feels the same as my old laptop with i7, SSD and 16gb ram did 7 years ago. Bloat ware everywhere, especially browsers.

This whole thread needs a huge amount of salt and some empirical examples. I think if you compared side-by-side it’d be different. I remember my upgrade from 2019 MacBook to M1, when every single task felt about 50% faster. Or from swapping a window laptop’s HDD with an SSD. (Absolutely massive performance improvement!) Waiting forever for older windows computers to boot, update, index or search files, install software, launch programs, etc. Waiting ages for an older iMac to render an iMovie timeline.

Others in the thread talking about the heyday of older spreadsheet and document programs that were just as fast. So? I bet you could write a book on the new features and more advanced tools that MS Excel offers today compared to 1995.

We went from things taking minutes to taking seconds. So you could improve things by 50% and that could be VERY noticeable. (1min to 30s, for example.) If your app already launches in 500ms, 250ms is not going to make your laptop feel 2x faster even if it is. On top of that, since speed has been good enough for general computing for several years now, new laptops focus more on energy efficiency. I bet that new laptop has meaningfully better battery and thermal performance!

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

#388

Post by fch42 »

titzer wrote: post #336
fch42 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote Wolfgang Pauli, this is not just not right, it's not even wrong ... The "C ABI" and libc are a rather stable part of Linux. Changing the behaviour of system calls ? Linus himself will be after you. And libc interfaces, to the largest part, "are" UNIX - it's what IEEE1003.1 defines. While Linux' glibc extends that, it doesn't break it. That's not the least what symbol revisions are for, and glibc is a huge us…

glibc is not stable on Linux. Syscalls are.

https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/software/libs/glibc/hjl/compat/

It's providing backwards compatibility (by symbol versioning). And that way allows for behaviour to evolve while retaining it for those who need that.

I would agree it's possibly messy. Especially if you're not willing or able to change your code providing builds for newer distros. That said though... ship the old builds. If they need it only libc, they'll be fine.

(the "dumpster fire" is really higher up the chain)

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

#389

Post by [deleted] »

threeseed wrote: post #365
guappa wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In several countries you can't file your taxes or access your bank without a google/apple smartphone. People need to live too.

What country only lets you file your taxes and do banking via a smartphone. It's always been an app in addition to a website.

[deleted]

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

#390

Post by manquer »

We have always been making more efficient software than ever before .

It is just a different kind of efficient, there is economic incentive in making software development process more efficient and not that much incentive for making software itself efficient .

Software development is more accessible to millions and millions of new developers due to the work on higher level languages, frameworks , IDEs , libraries , low code , copilots and so on .

Each of these innovations made software development more efficient (not necessarily faster ) .

Nobody buys or uses software because it is faster , only cheaper .

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