Dave Farber
2018-09-28 10:44:10 UTC
Right on. djf
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Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Software disenchantment
Date: September 28, 2018 at 6:09:30 PM GMT+9
[Note: This item comes from friend Judi Clark. DLH]
Software disenchantment
By Nikita Prokopov
Sep 17 2018
<http://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/>
Iâve been programming for 15 years now. Recently our industryâs lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and the IT in general.
Modern cars work, letâs say for the sake of argument, at 98% of whatâs physically possible with the current engine design. Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. All planes converged to the optimal size/form/load and basically look the same.
@tveastman: I have a Python program I run every day, it takes 1.5 seconds. I spent six hours re-writing it in rust, now it takes 0.06 seconds. That efficiency improvement means Iâll make my time back in 41 years, 24 days :-)
Youâve probably heard this mantra: âprogrammer time is more expensive than computer timeâ. What it means basically is that weâre wasting computers at an unprecedented scale. Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? With computers, we do that all the time.
Everything is unbearably slow
Look around: our portable computers are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that brought man to the moon. Yet every other webpage struggles to maintain a smooth 60fps scroll on the latest top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. I can comfortably play games, watch 4K videos but not scroll web pages? How is it ok?
It also animates empty white boxes instead of showing their content because itâs the only way anything can be animated on a webpage with decent performance. No, decent doesnât mean 60fps, itâs rather âas fast as this web page could possibly goâ. Iâm dying to see web community answer when 120Hz displays become mainstream. Shit barely hits 60Hz already.
Windows 10 takes 30 minutes to update. What could it possibly be doing for that long? That much time is enough to fully format my SSD drive, download a fresh build and install it like 5 times in a row.
Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update tiny rectangular region and modern text editors canât do that in 16ms. Itâs a lot of time. A LOT. A 3D game can fill the whole screen with hundreds of thousands (!!!) of polygons in the same 16ms and also process input, recalculate the world and dynamically load/unload resources. How come?
As a general trend, weâre not getting faster software with more features. Weâre getting faster hardware that runs slower software with the same features. Everything works way below the possible speed. Ever wonder why your phone needs 30 to 60 seconds to boot? Why canât it boot, say, in one second? There are no physical limitations to that. I would love to see that. I would love to see limits reached and explored, utilizing every last bit of performance we can get for something meaningful in a meaningful way.
Everything is HUUUUGE
And then thereâs bloat. Web apps could open up to 10Ã faster if you just simply block all ads. Google begs everyone to stop shooting themselves in their feet with AMP initiativeâa technology solution to a problem that doesnât need any technology, just a little bit of common sense. If you remove bloat, the web becomes crazy fast. How smart do you have to be to understand that?
Android system with no apps takes almost 6 Gb. Just think for a second how obscenely HUGE that number is. Whatâs in there, HD movies? I guess itâs basically code: kernel, drivers. Some string and resources too, sure, but those canât be big. So, how many drivers do you need for a phone?
[snip]
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-------------------------------------------Date: September 28, 2018 at 6:09:30 PM GMT+9
[Note: This item comes from friend Judi Clark. DLH]
Software disenchantment
By Nikita Prokopov
Sep 17 2018
<http://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/>
Iâve been programming for 15 years now. Recently our industryâs lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and the IT in general.
Modern cars work, letâs say for the sake of argument, at 98% of whatâs physically possible with the current engine design. Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. All planes converged to the optimal size/form/load and basically look the same.
@tveastman: I have a Python program I run every day, it takes 1.5 seconds. I spent six hours re-writing it in rust, now it takes 0.06 seconds. That efficiency improvement means Iâll make my time back in 41 years, 24 days :-)
Youâve probably heard this mantra: âprogrammer time is more expensive than computer timeâ. What it means basically is that weâre wasting computers at an unprecedented scale. Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? With computers, we do that all the time.
Everything is unbearably slow
Look around: our portable computers are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that brought man to the moon. Yet every other webpage struggles to maintain a smooth 60fps scroll on the latest top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. I can comfortably play games, watch 4K videos but not scroll web pages? How is it ok?
It also animates empty white boxes instead of showing their content because itâs the only way anything can be animated on a webpage with decent performance. No, decent doesnât mean 60fps, itâs rather âas fast as this web page could possibly goâ. Iâm dying to see web community answer when 120Hz displays become mainstream. Shit barely hits 60Hz already.
Windows 10 takes 30 minutes to update. What could it possibly be doing for that long? That much time is enough to fully format my SSD drive, download a fresh build and install it like 5 times in a row.
Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update tiny rectangular region and modern text editors canât do that in 16ms. Itâs a lot of time. A LOT. A 3D game can fill the whole screen with hundreds of thousands (!!!) of polygons in the same 16ms and also process input, recalculate the world and dynamically load/unload resources. How come?
As a general trend, weâre not getting faster software with more features. Weâre getting faster hardware that runs slower software with the same features. Everything works way below the possible speed. Ever wonder why your phone needs 30 to 60 seconds to boot? Why canât it boot, say, in one second? There are no physical limitations to that. I would love to see that. I would love to see limits reached and explored, utilizing every last bit of performance we can get for something meaningful in a meaningful way.
Everything is HUUUUGE
And then thereâs bloat. Web apps could open up to 10Ã faster if you just simply block all ads. Google begs everyone to stop shooting themselves in their feet with AMP initiativeâa technology solution to a problem that doesnât need any technology, just a little bit of common sense. If you remove bloat, the web becomes crazy fast. How smart do you have to be to understand that?
Android system with no apps takes almost 6 Gb. Just think for a second how obscenely HUGE that number is. Whatâs in there, HD movies? I guess itâs basically code: kernel, drivers. Some string and resources too, sure, but those canât be big. So, how many drivers do you need for a phone?
[snip]
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