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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: 0.21s | 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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yifanl ◴[13 May 25 14:59 UTC] No.43973705[source]▶
The Nintendo Switch on a chipset that was outdated a decade ago can run Tears of the Kingdom. It's not sensible that modern hardware is anything less than instant.
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astrange ◴[14 May 25 07:37 UTC] No.43981909[source]▶
That's because TOTK is designed to run on it, with careful compromises and a lot of manual tuning.

Nintendo comes up with a working game first and then adds the story - BotW/TotK are post-apocalyptic so they don't have to show you too many people on screen at once.

The other way you can tell this is that both games have the same story even though one is a sequel! Like Ganon takes over the castle/Hyrule and then Link defeats him, but then they go into the basement and somehow Ganon is there again and does the exact same thing again? Makes no sense.

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yifanl ◴[15 May 25 18:57 UTC] No.43998156[source]▶
> That's because TOTK is designed to run on it, with careful compromises and a lot of manual tuning.

Should I draw from this conclusion that modern software is not designed to run on modern hardware?

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1. astrange ◴[15 May 25 20:52 UTC] No.43999234[source]▶
Indeed it isn't. That's hard when everything is fighting against it.

Nintendo can do it because they only have one hardware target (unlike multiplatform games) and they can spend an extra year or two doing performance work.