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

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.

Clock speeds are 2000x higher than the 80s.

IPC could be 80x higher when taking into account SIMD and then you have to multiply by each core. Mainstream CPUs are more like 1 to 2 million times faster than what was there in the 80s.

You can get full refurbished office computers that are still in the million times faster range for a few hundred dollars.

The things you are describing don't have much to do with computers being slow and feeling slow, but they are happening anyway.

Scripting languages that are constantly allocating memory to any small operation and pointer chasing ever variable because the type is dynamic is part of the problem, then you have people writing extremely inefficient programs in an already terrible environment.

Most programs are written now in however way the person writing them wants to work, not how someone using it wishes they were written.

Most people have actually no concept of optimization or what runs faster than something else. The vast majority of programs are written by someone who gets it to work and thinks "this is how fast this program runs".

The idea that the same software can run faster is a niche thought process, not even everyone on hacker news thinks about software this way.