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

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.

The software desktop users have to put up with is slow.

1000x referred to the hardware capability, and that's not a rarity that is here.

The trouble is how software has since wasted a majority of that performance improvement.

Some of it has been quality of life improvements, leading nobody to want to use 1980s software or OS when newer versions are available.

But the lion's share of the performance benefit got chucked into the bin with poor design decisions, layers of abstractions, too many resources managed by too many different teams that never communicate making any software task have to knit together a zillion incompatible APIs, etc.