One word: DELIBERATELY.
How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
91–100 of 161 posts
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Desktop UI is painful. It doesn't help that Microsoft is seems to have quite a few competing UI frameworks and technologies these days. 1. What is your goal? Do you need to run on Windows and Linux? QT isn't bad, although I personally think the UI looks a little weird. It is definitely highly opinionated and parts of it are quite strange IMHO. There's probably lots of jobs writing with QT, which might be a nice side…
The primary goal is building tools that other (typically less tech-savvy) people can use to create various types of content (often video game related) and to semi-automate repetitive tasks. An example here would be our texture selection / marking tool [1]. As a more advanced example, think of an editor found in most modern game engines, like Flax Engine [2]. Windows is the primary target for these tools, but I'd real…
> I don't want to build a complete UI system from the ground up, but there are certain points where I'd like to be able to customize things, like adding new widgets and having some way to render 2D things without needing a graphics API surface -- think HTML canvas. I feel like ImGui does a pretty good job here, giving you drawing primitives.
Yes, Qt may not be super friendly with this. However, it is perfectly possible. Qt lets you integrate an "external canvas" that you can render with your favourite graphics API (e.g. OpenGL) and integrate it in the Qt Quick scene (or widgets if you prefer). For example, I did this with my notetataking application, Scrivano [1], for handwriting, where the main canvas is a separate OpenGL view that renders content using Skia, while the rest of the UI is standard Qt Quick.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#93I 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…
It’s kinda like adding lanes on the freeway: for a time traffic is nice but people get used to it and then more people start driving and it becomes just as congested as it was before.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#94> internet latency seems to be just barely sufficient
What? I played Quake 1-3, TFC over 56k with 300ms latency, on a CPU at least 20x slower than modern CPUs. Tribes 2 with 63 other players. Arguably more fun than the prescriptive matchmaking in games these days.
Games are a product of their environment. You don't let a pesky think like lag stop people having fun.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#95I 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…
It’s an evolving economics problem. Very few (I mean super extremely few) people really know how the web UI works without a framework and there is no incentive to know this because the more skilled a person becomes in that regard the less employable they become. As a 15 year former JavaScript developer I can see that things are changing in this regard with hiring slowing down, but there remains close to no incentive…
Doesn't it make you the go-to person when something goes wrong, and someone has to debug it?
My own experience from a time at a SpringBoot/iBATIS/Hibernate etc. shop (so server-side not UI side) is that it's all well and good running on "rocket fuel" as the consultants say, until something goes wrong. Then at some point you need the person who understands HTTP and SQL and other antique stuff to diagnose the problem, even if you can fix it at the abstraction layer.
One of the problems we had one day, was that a particular script "just wasn't working" and it turned out the file was being sent correctly, but with the content-type set to "text/html" by mistake because someone's "clever trick" interfered with SpringBoot's "magic" so the content-type detection wasn't running the way you'd want. Easy to fix, but you need to know what's going on in the first place.
Over time I also developed a feel for code smells of the form `return SomeItemDAO.fetchAll().size()` which runs just fine on the test server with a few thousand items, then you deploy it to prod where there's tens of millions and the database is on a different machine. It turns out SELECT COUNT is a thing!
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#96I think there are plenty of ways to make far better use of the hardware we currently enjoy. If you don't focus on web based stuff, but go with just what's possible in a Win32 environment, for example... it was all there in the late 1990s, VB6, Delphi, Excel, etc.
We've had quite a ride from 8 bit machines with toggle switches and not even a boot rom, nor floating point, to systems that can do 50 trillion 32 bit floating point operations per second, for the same price[1].
Remember that Lisp, a high level language, was invented in 1960, and ran on machines even slower than the first Altair.
The end of "free money" is over, as is the era of ever more compute. It's time to make better use of the silicon, to get one last slice of the pie.
[1] The Altair was $500 assembled in 1975, which is $2900 today. I'm not sure how best to invest $2900 to get the most compute today. My best guess is an NVidia RTX 4080.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I saw a talk about tigerbeetle the other day - which is a small, fast database for handling financial transactions that apparenty runs orders of magnitude faster than Postgres. The database binary has no dependencies and compiles to 500kb. Its authors were joking they could distribute it on floppy disks if they wanted. It’s written in Zig, not C. But that style of programming is still available to us if we want it. E…
if [ "$os" = "Darwin" ]; then arch="universal" os="macos" elif [ "$os" = "Linux" ]; then os="linux" else echo "Unsupported OS." exit 1 fi This is nothing to emulate.
That's just the codepath from bootstrap.sh that downloads the binaries. I don't know if it will compile and run on, say, FreeBSD. It's quite possible no one tried.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s an evolving economics problem. Very few (I mean super extremely few) people really know how the web UI works without a framework and there is no incentive to know this because the more skilled a person becomes in that regard the less employable they become. As a 15 year former JavaScript developer I can see that things are changing in this regard with hiring slowing down, but there remains close to no incentive…
Doesn't it make you the go-to person when something goes wrong, and someone has to debug it? My own experience from a time at a SpringBoot/iBATIS/Hibernate etc. shop (so server-side not UI side) is that it's all well and good running on "rocket fuel" as the consultants say, until something goes wrong. Then at some point you need the person who understands HTTP and SQL and other antique stuff to diagnose the problem,…
> Doesn't it make you the go-to person when something goes wrong, and someone has to debug it?
Assuming anyone cares enough. Alternative approaches include, ignoring the problem, working around it, or changing business requirements so that the feature isn't available anymore.
There are a lot of people in the industry that just throw up their hands at roadblocks they can't solve and say something is not technically possible. These people include "tech leads" or other high-level software roles at companies.
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#99I 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 do wonder about this often. Are these new UI frameworks iterating upwards towards some unknown featureset archetype, where if given another 10-20 years, the designers will say "Okay, we've reached diminishing feature returns, let's pack it up and optimize" Or, are we simply re-inventing the wheel each time, where the set of features over the last few decades really haven't change that much or cycles through feature…
> Or, are we simply re-inventing the wheel each time,
This is how it has been since I've been in the industry (2005). it's part of why I got out of web development; it felt like a whole lot of relearning how to do the same thing every few years. At first, there was incremental feature gains, but after a while, it felt like newer frameworks or approaches were a functional step back (i.e., NoSQL, the fact that it eventually came to stand for "not only SQL" tells all).
Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?
#100Look no further than developers on Ethereum, who are still doing shit like voluntarily writing assembly for basic software to account for compute constraints. I can say from some brief experience, it’s a reality that I’m glad we don’t all occupy.