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

Post by josephg » Tue, Apr 09, 2024, 10:35 AM UTC

red_admiral wrote: post #59

josephg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Back when Java had just introduced Swing to supplement/complement AWT, I remember you had a set of components (that you could even style in different ways with themes), a fairly object-oriented approach, and with the open-source MiG layout manager (that still exists today) a powerful way of laying out forms with constraints to adapt to changing screen/window/font sizes. I feel like UI framework progress from Windows…

Post by red_admiral » Tue, Apr 09, 2024, 10:43 AM UTC

josephg wrote: post #62

red_admiral wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when Java had just introduced Swing to supplement/complement AWT, I remember you had a set of components (that you could even style in different ways with themes), a fairly object-oriented approach, and with the open-source MiG layout manager (that still exists today) a powerful way of laying out forms with constraints to adapt to changing screen/window/font sizes. I feel like UI framework progress from Windows…

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

Post by rubymamis » Tue, Apr 09, 2024, 10:49 AM UTC

moshegramovsky wrote: post #65

rubymamis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You're right. QT is a good choice if you are willing to work within the bounds of the framework. QT is definitely not a good choice if you want to make a lot of customizations. If you want to make an app like Spotify, don't use QT.

Post by holsta » Tue, Apr 09, 2024, 11:03 AM UTC

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…

  if [ "$os" = "Darwin" ]; then
    arch="universal"
    os="macos"
  elif [ "$os" = "Linux" ]; then
    os="linux"
  else
    echo "Unsupported OS."
   exit 1
  fi

Post by laserbeam » Tue, Apr 09, 2024, 11:18 AM UTC

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…