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

(twitter.com)
848 points turrini | 1 comments | 13 May 25 10:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.423s | 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. xlii ◴[14 May 25 05:35 UTC] No.43981157[source]▶
It really depends at what you look.

You say snappy, but what is snappy? I right now have a toy project in progress in zig that uses users perception as a core concept.

Rarely one can react to 10ms jank. But when you get to bare metal development 10ms becomes 10 million of reasonably high level instructions that can be done. Now go to website, click. If you can sense a delay from JS this means that jank is approximately 100ms; does clicking that button, really should be 100 million instructions?

When you look close enough you will find that not only it’s 100 million instructions but your operating system along with processor made tens of thousands of tricks in the background to minimize the jank and yet you still can sense it.

Today even writing in non optimized, unpopular languages like Prolog is viable because hardware is mindblowing fast, and yet some things are slow, because we utilize that speed to decrease development costs.