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.

Except we've squandered that 1000x not on bounds checking but on countless layers of abstractions and inefficiency.

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.

I just clicked on the network icon next to the clock on a Windows 11 laptop. A gray box appeared immediately, about one second later all the buttons for wifi, bluetooth, etc appeared. Windows is full of situations like this, that require no network calls, but still take over one second to render.

It's strange, it visibly loading the buttons is indicative they use async technology that can use multithreaded CPUs effectively... but it's slower than the old synchronous UI stuff.

I'm sure it's significantly more expensive to render than Windows 3.11 - XP were - rounded corners and scalable vector graphics instead of bitmaps or whatever - but surely not that much? And the resulting graphics can be cached.

Windows 3.1 wasn't checking WiFi, Bluetooth, energy saving profile, night light setting, audio devices, current power status and battery level, audio devices, and more when clicking the non-existent icon on the non-existent taskbar. Windows XP didn't have this quick setting area at all. But I do recall having the volume slider take a second to render on XP from time to time, and that was only rendering a slider.

And FWIW this stuff is then cached. I hadn't clicked that setting area in a while (maybe the first time this boot?) and did get a brief gray box that then a second later populated with all the buttons and settings. Now every time I click it again it appears instantly.

But is this cache trustworthy or will it eventually lead you to click in the wrong place because the situation changed and now there's a new button making everything change place?

And even if every information takes a bit to figure out, it doesn't excuse taking a second to even draw the UI. If checking bluetooth takes a second, then draw the button immediately but disable interaction and show a loading icon, and when you get the blutooth information update the button, and so on for everything else.

As someone who routinely hops between WiFi networks, I've never seen a wrong value here.

And OK, we'll draw a tile with all the buttons with greyed out status for that half second and then refresh to show the real status. Did that really make things better, or did it make it worse?

And if we bothered keeping all that in memory, and kept using the CPU cycles to make sure it was actually accurate and up to date on the click six hours later, wouldn't people then complain about how obviously bloated it was? How is this not a constant battle of being unable to appease any critics until we're back at the Win 3.1 state of things with no Bluetooth devices, no WiFi networks, no dynamic changing or audio devices, etc?

And remember, we're comparing this to just rendering a volume slider which still took a similar or worse amount of time and offered far less features.

> And OK, we'll draw a tile with all the buttons with greyed out status for that half second and then refresh to show the real status. Did that really make things better, or did it make it worse?

Clearly better. Most of the buttons should also work instantly, most of the information should also be available instantly. The button layout is rendered instantly, so I can already figure out where I want to click without having to wait one second even if the button is not enabled yet, and by the time my mouse reaches it it will probably be enabled.

> And remember, we're comparing this to just rendering a volume slider which still took a similar or worse amount of time and offered far less features.

I've never seen the volume slider in Windows 98 take one second to render. Not even the start menu, which is much more complex, and which in Windows 11 often takes a second, and search results also show up after a random amount of time and shuffle the results around a few times, leading to many misclicks.