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

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837 points turrini | 4 comments | 13 May 25 10:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.723s | source
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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. Aurornis ◴[13 May 25 19:17 UTC] No.43976554[source]▶
I can never tell if all of these comments are exaggerations to make a point, or if some people really have computers so slow that everything takes 20 seconds to launch (like the other comment claims).

I'm sure some of these people are using 10 year old corporate laptops with heavy corporate anti-virus scanning, leading to slow startup times. However, I think a lot of people are just exaggerating. If it's not instantly open, it's too long for them.

I, too, can get programs like Slack and Visual Studio Code to launch in a couple seconds at most, in contrast to all of these comments claiming 20 second launch times. I also don't quit these programs, so the only time I see that load time is after an update or reboot. Even if every program did take 20 seconds to launch and I rebooted my computer once a week, the net time lost would be measured in a couple of minutes.

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2. vdqtp3 ◴[13 May 25 22:37 UTC] No.43978546[source]▶
It's not an exaggeration.

I have a 12 core Ryzen 9 with 64GB of RAM, and clicking the emoji reaction button in Signal takes long enough to render the fixed set of emojis that I've begun clicking the empty space where I know the correct emoji will appear.

For years I've been hitting the Windows key, typing the three or four unique characters for the app I want and hitting enter, because the start menu takes too long to appear. As a side note, that no longer works since Microsoft decided that predictability isn't a valuable feature, and the list doesn't filter the same way every time or I get different results depending on how fast I type and hit enter.

Lots of people literally outpace the fastest hardware on the market, and that is insane.

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3. ryao ◴[14 May 25 09:27 UTC] No.43982568[source]▶
I have a 16 core Ryzen 9 with 128GB of RAM. I have not noticed any slowness in Signal. This might be caused by differences in our operating systems. It sounds like you run Windows. I run Gentoo Linux.
4. Aurornis ◴[14 May 25 22:39 UTC] No.43989918[source]▶
> It's not an exaggeration.

The comment I quoted was about 20 second load times, not a slight delay before something is clickable. That's the exaggeration.

FWIW, I don't see the same slowness in Signal, like the other poster.