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

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838 points turrini | 1 comments | 13 May 25 10:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | 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. Mr_Minderbinder ◴[14 May 25 13:44 UTC] No.43984465[source]▶
I notice a pattern in the kinds of software that people are complaining about. They tend to be user-facing interactive software that is either corporate, proprietary, SaaS, “late-stage” or contains large amounts of telemetry. Since I tend to avoid such software, the vast majority of software I use I have no complaints about with respect to speed and responsiveness. The biggest piece of corporate bloatware I have is Chromium which (only) takes 1-2 seconds to launch and my system is not particularly powerful. In the corporate world bloat is a proxy for sophistication, for them it is a desirable feature so you should expect it. They would rather you use several JavaScript frameworks when the job could be done with plain HTML because it shows how rich/important/fashionable/relevant/high-tech they are.