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The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

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837 points turrini | 7 comments | 13 May 25 10:31 UTC | HN request time: 1.557s | source | bottom
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titzer ◴[13 May 25 12:05 UTC] No.43971962[source]▶
I like to point out that since ~1980, computing power has increased about 1000X.

If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that), and we turned it on everywhere, we could have computers that are just a mere 950X faster.

If you went back in time to 1980 and offered the following choice:

I'll give you a computer that runs 950X faster and doesn't have a huge class of memory safety vulnerabilities, and you can debug your programs orders of magnitude more easily, or you can have a computer that runs 1000X faster and software will be just as buggy, or worse, and debugging will be even more of a nightmare.

People would have their minds blown at 950X. You wouldn't even have to offer 1000X. But guess what we chose...

Personally I think the 1000Xers kinda ruined things for the rest of us.

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_aavaa_ ◴[13 May 25 12:15 UTC] No.43972050[source]▶
Except we've squandered that 1000x not on bounds checking but on countless layers of abstractions and inefficiency.
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Gigachad ◴[13 May 25 12:34 UTC] No.43972215[source]▶
Am I taking crazy pills or are programs not nearly as slow as HN comments make them out to be? Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone. Every program is incredibly responsive. 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems.

The only thing I can think of that’s slow is Autodesk Fusion starting up. Not really sure how they made that so bad but everything else seems super snappy.

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1. _aavaa_ ◴[13 May 25 12:43 UTC] No.43972292[source]▶
I'd wager that a 2021 MacBook, like the one I have, is stronger than the laptop used by majority of people in the world.

Life on an entry or even mid level windows laptop is a very different world.

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2. josephg ◴[13 May 25 12:54 UTC] No.43972406[source]▶
Yep. Developers make programs run well enough on the hardware sitting on our desks. So long as we’re well paid (and have decent computers ourselves), we have no idea what the average computing experience is for people still running 10yo computers which were slow even for the day. And that keeps the treadmill going. We make everyone need to upgrade every few years.

A few years ago I accidentally left my laptop at work on a Friday afternoon. Instead of going into the office, I pulled out a first generation raspberry pi and got everything set up on that. Needless to say, our nodejs app started pretty slowly. Not for any good reason - there were a couple modules which pulled in huge amounts of code which we didn’t use anyway. A couple hours work made the whole app start 5x faster and use half the ram. I would never have noticed that was a problem with my snappy desktop.

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3. thfuran ◴[13 May 25 13:07 UTC] No.43972522[source]▶
I've found so many performance issues at work by booting up a really old laptop or working remotely from another continent. It's pretty straightforward to simulate either poor network conditions or generally low performance hardware, but we just don't generally bother to chase down those issues.
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4. _aavaa_ ◴[13 May 25 13:27 UTC] No.43972720[source]▶
Oh yeah, I didn't even touch on devs being used to working on super faster internet.

If you're on Mac, go install Network Link Conditioner and crank that download an upload speed way down. (Xcode > Open Developer Tools > More Developer Tools... > "Additional Tools for Xcode {Version}").

5. BobaFloutist ◴[13 May 25 17:28 UTC] No.43975444[source]▶
When I bought my current laptop, it was the cheapest one Costco had with 8 gigs of memory, which was at the time plenty for all but specialized uses. I've since upgraded it to 16, which feels like the current standard for that.

But...why? Why on earth do I need 16 gigs of memory for web browsing and basic application use? I'm not even playing games on this thing. But there was an immediate, massive spike in performance when I upgraded the memory. It's bizarre.

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6. thewebguyd ◴[13 May 25 17:31 UTC] No.43975470[source]▶
> Yep. Developers make programs run well enough on the hardware sitting on our desks. So long as we’re well paid (and have decent computers ourselves), we have no idea what the average computing experience is for people still running 10yo computers which were slow even for the day. And that keeps the treadmill going. We make everyone need to upgrade every few years.

Same thing happens with UI & Website design. When the designers and front-end devs all have top-spec MacBooks, with 4k+ displays, they design to look good in that environment.

Then you ship to the rest of the world which are still for the most part on 16:9 1920x1080 (or god forbid, 1366x768), low spec windows laptops and the UI looks like shit and is borderline unstable.

Now I don't necessarily think things should be designed for the lowest common denominator, but at the very least we should be taking into consideration that the majority of users probably don't have super high end machines or displays. Even today you can buy a brand new "budget" windows laptop that'll come with 8GB of RAM, and a tiny 1920x1080 display, with poor color reproduction and crazy low brightness - and that's what the majority of people are using, if they are using a computer at all and not a phone or tablet.

7. aspenmayer ◴[13 May 25 19:14 UTC] No.43976527[source]▶
Most cheap laptops these days ship with only one stick of RAM, and thus are only operating in single-channel mode. By adding another memory module, you can operate in dual-channel mode which can increase performance a lot. You can see the difference in performance by running a full memory test in single-channel mode vs multi-channel mode with a program like memtest86 or memtest86+ or others.