What a glorious combination of things! What a shame faster, more reliable and cheaper don't usually go together, but that's the challenge all developers face...
Unfortunately, speed and efficiency of software is too low on many developer's totem pole. Feature bloat, time to market pressures, unrealistic schedules, and 'scale-out' architectures are much more prominent priorities than building tight, elegant code that runs fast even on old hardware.
I'm simultaneously grateful that we value developer time and wellbeing over software performance and appalled that we too often forget the relationship between software performance and developer time and wellbeing.
Yeah, it's wild - feels like we see "software is so slow now! nobody optimizes software anymore, they just run Python and burn cycles!" posts all the time, but man, when a company REALLY wants to optimize something -- it's a thing of beauty.
or we could just, you know, write better software. I'm not going to go on a whole rant about the link between software quality and hardware speed, but I will say this:
If we can write an app that does the job for a low power device, we can write the same app for a high power device and not make any compromises. I wonder why we don't do that. As in, why don't we develop software that runs as fast as it can? Some companies do, and it's really nice to see, and especially game developers are notoriously good at this. Yet, if I want a cross platform chat service, I usually have to put up with code running in a JS interpreter, through a JIT compiler, in a sandbox in a sandbox in a browser, burning CPU cycles so hard my laptop thermally throttles.
Because managing to output features and documentations while maintaining a high level of quality at this speed is amazing.
I don't know with what geniuses you work with, but the team I workin are generally incapable of something remotly close. Or maybe I'm just a bad programmer amazed at an ordinary day of work.
I think there’s a balance to be struck between developer convenience and product quality+performance. If every developer leaned to the extreme convenience we’d quickly end up with a lot of unusable software.
It's not just dev time vs cpu time.
The thing the article mentions and what I was trying to echo is that software is slow and overcomplicated despite that. It would be unusable without fast hardware.
But people are used to programs being slow and bloated. People and companies are rarely willing to pay premium for efficient programs. So here we are, gluing stuff together so that we're fast to market with every next feature while collectively wasting lifetimes as our apps load and perform basic actions.
I am not even saying it's wrong. There are plenty of things I'd rather have now and slow than later/never and fast. Nor I am saying given the time I'm capable of making all our software significantly leaner and faster. I am just echoing the disenchantment and some frustrations.
I hope you are right, and also someone else will pick this up -- I've just seen an awful lot of projects over the years that provide a huge speedup for 90-95% of the functionality of other products, and very few manage to keep the speedup once they hit full functionality.
It would be nice if every developer had to run their latest build on 10 year old hardware while testing it out.
Instead of their high-powered development machine with the latest CPU, tons of high speed memory, and the fastest SSD; they would get to experience what many of their customers have to endure on slower hardware with capacity constraints.
Nothing spurs optimization like seeing first hand how your code creeps along on slow hardware.
reply