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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?

#391

Post by scotty79 »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #318
modeless wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this argument is that the tools for proprietary platforms are inferior to the cross-platform ones in many cases. VSCode is better than XCode or Android Studio. GCC and Clang are better than MSVC. We don't need platform lock-in to subsidize good tools because the best tools are unencumbered. I'd happily build iOS apps without XCode or any of Apple's frameworks to save the 30% fee. Heck, I'd do it even…

> VSCode is better than XCode or Android Studio That’s just your opinion though isn’t it

That's just an opinion. Not only his. It's shared by many.

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

#392

Post by can16358p »

rumad wrote: post #181
can16358p wrote: post #167

I think convenience is the keyword. Users (not us HN crowd, the rest of the world) don't want to struggle with installing software, most of them don't know the difference between Internet, Browser, or "app". They just open up "internet" and work on docs, and for 99% of the cases Google Docs works fine despite running in a browser that is much less efficient than a native "app". For most cases it's more than enough fo…

I also love to use and prefer native apps. But, in my case, I had to offer Google Docs to my dad. Because he wanted to transfer his doc file to his work computer to continue to work on it when he is at the office. So, I thought a web app might be good for him.

Sure it's a perfectly normal thing. I'm talking about Google side of things: they're probably not caring about performance when dealing with 30MB large docs as it's not what people use in their docs anyway.

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

#393

Post by miyuru »

Doogle Docs is mentioned in the article, but Google Drive is way worse.

Try to upload a folder with 20+ small files(say a picture galley) it takes a lot of time to process and upload them. If you add a new file to the folder and try to upload the folder, it will need to upload the whole thing again.

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

#394

Post by austinjp »

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…

I take your point, but people certainly do complain about performance and download sizes, they just do it indirectly by describing the side effects. Only recently my partner asked me why her laptop got so hot. An iPhone user I know said they hate it when their phone got "screen freeze", in other words when it became unresponsive. They didn't describe it in terms of performance or app size, even though those are the underlying problems. Anyone trying to download a large app on a phone with poor signal will get frustrated, and people who live in areas with unreliable internet experience third daily. People on low incomes or living in developing nations can often only use older devices which get clogged up with large, slow apps and become frustrating to use.

If you feel that people don't care about performance and download size, you may be asking the wrong people the wrong questions.

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

#395

Post by FeepingCreature »

noahtallen wrote: post #387
ponector wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 softwa…

If you keep your software up to date, every hardware upgrade will feel like a significant improvement. But you're comparing the end of one hardware cycle to the beginning of the next. You regain by upgrading what you previously lost to gradual bloat.

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

#396

Post by worksonmine »

ab8 wrote: post #244

It is interesting to see most people lay the blame at the feet of developers. The reality is that these are all business decisions: 1) Move to the cloud because the business likes the steady payout of subscriptions. Business customers love not having to hire IT teams and demand six 9s of uptime because it is someone else’s responsibility. But performance needs to just be acceptable to end users. 2) Customers refusing…

You can have efficient web apps running on the cloud, it's just a server after all. The issue lies with developers developing on machines their users can't afford and not caring about performance and efficient code.

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

#397

Post by dimask »

wredue wrote: post #303
fragmede wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't sign your binaries on macOS, the friction for the user to run your app is prohibitive, outside of developer-focused communities.

I’m not sure what is “prohibitive” about pressing literally one button.

If it is a company laptop, it can be impossible (unless you sort of hack it to circumvent the security settings they put).

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

#398

Post by stavros »

Aaron2222 wrote: post #300
rblatz wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to pay to do that on MacOS, they can bypass the warning saying it’s unsigned and that the developer can’t be positively identified.

Apple should really provide free codesigning for free/open source software.

What does software being signed signify? Does it mean it's vetted? Can a malware author pay the $X and have their malware signed?

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

#399

Post by jillesvangurp »

Making software efficiently is more valuable than making more efficient software. Making software inefficiently takes a lot of time and people's time is expensive. A good example of an expensive use of time is optimizing something that doesn't really need optimizing. I know a lot of people go OCD on this stuff and I've been there and done that myself. But it mostly does not matter a lot in terms of value of the software.

Anyone that can't be bothered to update their ten year old laptop because it's slow is also not going to spend a lot on faster software. There's just not a lot of money in optimizing stuff. And if you have a modern laptop, it doesn't really benefit a lot from the type of optimizations you'd do to make things run smooth on a ten year old laptop. Especially when optimizations are simply about turning stuff off that aren't really in the way on the faster laptop. Like having some cheap 3D effects, pretty colors and animations, etc.

Anyway, I'm old enough to know that this is not a new debate. We never lost our way on this front. It was always like this even when computers were several orders of magnitude slower.

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

#400

Post by rini17 »

mardifoufs wrote: post #376
guappa wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they'd rather spend weeks to reimplement scrolling.

Lol scrolling on qt is worse than on the web. I mean, you can use normal scrolling super easily on both (you don't have to do anything, and it just works). But truly custom scrolling is much harder on qt than web. In a way that's a good thing, but again, the default is just as easy on the web as it is on QT. Plus you don't have to deal with the qtquick/qtwidgets/etc thing and the non open source parts of qt

Because subverting users' expectations about scrolling is the step 0 of efficient software. /s
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