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

(twitter.com)
837 points turrini | 18 comments | 13 May 25 10:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.424s | 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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maccard ◴[13 May 25 13:16 UTC] No.43972605[source]▶
Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch. My corporate VPN app takes 30 seconds to go from a blank screen to deciding if it’s going to prompt me for credentials or remember my login, every morning. This is on an i9 with 64GB ram, and 1GN fiber.

On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news sites, all take 10+ seconds to load or be functional, and their core functionality has regressed significantly in the last decade. I’m not talking about features that I prefer, but as an example if you load two links in Reddit in two different tabs my experience has been that it’s 50/50 if they’ll actually both load or if one gets stuck either way skeletons.

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1. aloha2436 ◴[13 May 25 13:39 UTC] No.43972862[source]▶
I'm on a four year old mid-tier laptop and opening VS Code takes maybe five seconds. Opening IDEA takes five seconds. Opening twitter on an empty cache takes perhaps four seconds and I believe I am a long way from their servers.

On my work machine slack takes five seconds, IDEA is pretty close to instant, the corporate VPN starts nearly instantly (although the Okta process seems unnecessarily slow I'll admit), and most of the sites I use day-to-day (after Okta) are essentially instant to load.

I would say that your experiences are not universal, although snappiness was the reason I moved to apple silicon macs in the first place. Perhaps Intel is to blame.

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2. Cthulhu_ ◴[13 May 25 13:56 UTC] No.43973037[source]▶
VS Code defers a lot of tasks to the background at least. This is a bit more visible in intellij; you seem to measure how long it takes to show its window, but how long does it take for it to warm up and finish indexing / loading everything, or before it actually becomes responsive?

Anyway, five seconds is long for a text editor; 10, 15 years ago, sublime text loaded and opened up a file in <1 second, and it still does today. Vim and co are instant.

Also keep in mind that desktop computers haven't gotten significantly faster for tasks like opening applications in the past years; they're more efficient (especially the M line CPUs) and have more hardware for specialist workloads like what they call AI nowadays, but not much innovation in application loading.

You use a lot of words like "pretty close to", "nearly", "essentially", but 10, 20 years ago they WERE instant; applications from 10, 20 years ago should be so much faster today than they were on hardware from back then.

I wish the big desktop app builders would invest in native applications. I understand why they go for web technology (it's the crossplatform GUI technology that Java and co promised and offers the most advanced styling of anything anywhere ever), but I wish they invested in it to bring it up to date.

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3. _Algernon_ ◴[13 May 25 14:49 UTC] No.43973596[source]▶
>Anyway, five seconds is long for a text editor; 10, 15 years ago, sublime text loaded and opened up a file in <1 second, and it still does today. Vim and co are instant.

Do any of those do the indexing that cause the slowness? If not it's comparing apples to oranges.

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4. ◴[13 May 25 15:32 UTC] No.43974066[source]▶
5. vel0city ◴[13 May 25 16:26 UTC] No.43974668[source]▶
It's probably more so that any corporate Windows box has dozens of extra security and metrics agents interrupting and blocking every network request and file open and OS syscall installed by IT teams while the Macs have some very basic MDM profile applied.
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6. maccard ◴[13 May 25 16:50 UTC] No.43974979{3}[source]▶
Riders startup time isn’t including indexing. Indexing my entire project takes minutes but it does it in the background.
7. maccard ◴[13 May 25 17:00 UTC] No.43975101[source]▶
This is my third high end workstation computer in the last 5 years and my experience has been roughly consistent with.

My corporate vpn app is a disaster on so many levels, it’s an internally developed app as opposed to Okta or anything like that.

I would likewise say that your experience is not universal, and that in many circumstances the situation is much worse. My wife is running an i5 laptop from 2020 and her work intranet is a 60 second load time. Outlook startup and sync are measured in minutes including mailbox fetching. You can say this is all not the app developers fault, but the crunch that’s installed on her machine is slowing things down by 5 or 10x and that slowdown wouldn’t be a big deal if the apps had reasonable load times in the first place.

8. rtkwe ◴[13 May 25 17:13 UTC] No.43975270[source]▶
Sublime Text isn't an IDE though so comparing it to VS Code is comparing grapes and apples. VS Code is doing a lot more.
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9. thewebguyd ◴[13 May 25 17:19 UTC] No.43975345[source]▶
5 seconds is a lot for a machine with an M4 Pro, and tons of RAM and a very fast SSD.

There's native apps just as, if not more, complicated than VSCode that open faster.

The real problem is electron. There's still good, performant native software out there. We've just settled on shipping a web browser with every app instead.

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10. maccard ◴[13 May 25 17:26 UTC] No.43975416[source]▶
There is snappy electron software out there too, to be fair. If you create a skeleton electron app it loads just fine. A perceptible delay but still quick.

The problem is when you load it and then react and all its friends, and design your software for everything to be asynchronous and develop it on a 0 latency connection over localhost with a team of 70 people where nobody is holistically considering “how long does it take from clicking the button to doing the thing I want it to do”

11. maccard ◴[13 May 25 17:29 UTC] No.43975459{3}[source]▶
I disagree. Vs code uses plugins for all its heavy lifting. Even a minimal plugin setup is substantially slower to load than sublime is, which can also have an LSP plugin.
12. maccard ◴[13 May 25 22:47 UTC] No.43978628[source]▶
> You use a lot of words like "pretty close to", "nearly", "essentially", but 10, 20 years ago they WERE instant; applications from 10, 20 years ago should be so much faster today than they were on hardware from back then.

11 years ago I put in a ticket to slack asking them about their resource usage. Their desktop app was using more memory than my IDE and compilers and causing heap space issues with visual studio. 10 years ago things were exactly the same. 15 years ago, my coworkers were complaining that VS2010 was a resource hog compared to 10 years ago. My memory of loading photoshop in the early 2000’s was that it took absolutely forever and was slow as molasses on my home PC.

I don’t think it’s necessarily gotten worse, I think it’s always been pathetically bad.

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13. genewitch ◴[14 May 25 01:29 UTC] No.43979772{3}[source]▶
Photoshop for windows 3.11 loads in a couple seconds on a 100mhz pentium. Checked two days ago.
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14. maccard ◴[14 May 25 05:47 UTC] No.43981215{4}[source]▶
That was 30 years ago, not 10.
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15. genewitch ◴[14 May 25 06:37 UTC] No.43981543{5}[source]▶
"early 2000s" was at least 22 years ago, as well. Sorry if this ruins your night. 100mhz 1994 vs 1000mhz in 2000, that's the only parallel i was drawing. 10x faster yet somehow adobe...
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16. maccard ◴[14 May 25 07:23 UTC] No.43981810{6}[source]▶
Ah sorry - I’m in my mid 30s so my early pc experiences as a “power user” were win XP, by which point photoshop had already bolted on the kitchen sink and autodesk required a blood sacrifice to start up.
17. makapuf ◴[14 May 25 10:09 UTC] No.43982775{3}[source]▶
VScode isn't an IDE either, visual studio is one. After that it all depends what plugins you loaded in both of them.
18. CelestialMystic ◴[14 May 25 12:42 UTC] No.43983833[source]▶
This is exactly it. My Debian Install on older hardware than my work machine is relatively snappy. The real killer is the Windows Defender Scans once a week. 20-30% CPU usage for the entire morning because it is trying to scan some CDK.OUT directory (if I delete the directory, the scan doesn't take nearly as long).