the slowest part of most software is still the part where a human has to wait for a build to finish before they can remember what they were doing
There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
421–430 of 529 posts
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you suggesting Electron is slow? What evidence do you have? There may be a +200ms start up time compared to a native application; is that so bad? Besides a bootup that is no longer than your browser's, everything else inside an Electron app can be identically fast to a native application. Please be a better filter - do not spread bad memes.
> everything else inside an Electron app can be identically fast to a native application. HTML layout and rendering is almost never as fast as GUIs like Qt. Also Electron apps usually use JavaScript which is slower than "fast" languages like C++/Rust/Kotlin/etc. The reason people use Electron is because it's easy, especially if you have to have a website anyway. Slack is a great example of this. They already have a f…
You are right about "almost never as fast as", but it is imperceptible to any human. We're talking about less than 100ms to render basically any typical UI, which then updates faster than 30fs. I said "identically fast"; I should have said "with respect to human perception".
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#423That’s the exact opposite impression of my recent user experiences of software: slower than ever.
Contrary to what initiatives like the tigerbeetle team is doing with tigerstyle, or the 10 nasa coding rules, code created by llms tends to be verbose and slow.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#424 Lol got my mac M5 128GB I'll import a JS framework for multiplying numbers
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#425The peak of fast software was definitely Windows XP, Windows 7, and OS X Snow Leopard. I don't see us returning to that glorious era.
Recently I was frustrated by Windows 11's seeming inability to open a context menu with acceptable speed - right click an item in the taskbar and there is nearly a 1000ms delay before the menu appears. That is unacceptable.
When I need to run old software, I now try to the "minimum viable runner" OS - start with an XP VM and slowly move upwards if it doesn't work. Obviously I'll lock it down from internet access/etc., but it really shows that modern OSes really don't have a grip on performance.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#426The peak of fast software was definitely Windows XP, Windows 7, and OS X Snow Leopard. I don't see us returning to that glorious era. Recently I was frustrated by Windows 11's seeming inability to open a context menu with acceptable speed - right click an item in the taskbar and there is nearly a 1000ms delay before the menu appears. That is unacceptable. When I need to run old software, I now try to the "minimum via…
The peak of fast software is right now within the open source ecosystem.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Apple Music is the most egregious example of this. It could be ridiculously fast on your pocket supercomputer but the moment a web request gets fired off from stumbling blindly across the field-of-dung user interface, bam, you’re done. Especially if your network connection isn’t great at that time. Things like this really pushed me to everything local systems. I’ll move actual files around if I want to do anythi…
Sonos’ app is another example of this. As a very brief tl;dr if anyone isn’t aware of it, Sonos is a wireless speaker company that can group speakers in different rooms into zones, so you can have different music playing in different rooms, or all the same, or at different volumes, etc. The quality isn’t going to blow away audiophiles, but IMO they’re legitimately great. The original design had the speakers setting u…
So many developers do this, and it's infuriating. I have a device sitting there on my perfectly good LAN, yet if I want to remote control it, the brilliant software decides to send the commands to the Internet, then back to my device, then the response gets routed to the Internet, and back to my phone.
Device developers, stop doing this! You people realize that LANs exist, don't you?
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#428One of the biggest causes of slowness is just waiting for web requests. The fact that so much software is either online or built using the same stack even if it isn't, puts all that software in this blocked/waiting state constantly while using it. Anyone not in the US feels this even more since so much online is US hosted, 300ms for every little interaction adds up quick. If your software has the affordance of a wait…
One of my all-time favorite software quotes is, "The fastest request is no request at all." After traveling around in places with very poor wifi/phone data speeds. I couldn't agree more with you.
This has been my bugbear for years. Even in places with good cell service on average there's a hundred individual places that have terrible service. Also a good signal to the handset doesn't necessarily mean good actual service. It doesn't even require traveling, just normal daily movements to get wildly variable network performance.
It's infuriating when it's obvious that the developer of an app only ever tested it in a simulator on their dev machine on their super fast WiFi. It never seems to connect with those people developing a mobile app (or web app) that the "mobile" part has a meaning more than just on a handheld device.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#429One of the biggest causes of slowness is just waiting for web requests. The fact that so much software is either online or built using the same stack even if it isn't, puts all that software in this blocked/waiting state constantly while using it. Anyone not in the US feels this even more since so much online is US hosted, 300ms for every little interaction adds up quick. If your software has the affordance of a wait…
Is the 300ms ping time why discord takes ~10-30 seconds to load?
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being offline available/fallback and offline first are two different things
Yes, but my point is that it's an awfully shitty fallback if you need to wait 30 seconds for something to time out first. It's one thing not to e.g. spend the extra time to ensure everything is cached and mutations are queued up. It's another thing not to do the bare minimum to ensure what is already available and working locally is gated on the network being up. Case in point: The other day I was checking our train…
Yeah, those apps were all coded in perfect network conditions and the designers refuse to change the UX to inform user about origin of data (offline, last cached X mins ago etc.)