Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

https://rufatmammadli.medium.com/did-we-lose-our-way-in-making-efficient-software-30-mb-doc-file-vs-browser-fed12dd866a4

by rumad • 2 years ago

264 477 2 years ago

rufatmammadli.medium.com

BobbyTables2• 2 years ago

In the early 90s, I believe MS Word came on a few floppy disks and the main executable was 2MB. It ran fine on a 16Mhz 386 with a total of 2MB RAM (let that sink in!)

It did pretty much everything it does now, only lacked a grammar checker. (WordPerfect had one.)

Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained?

We not only lost the way, we don’t even know the destination any more.

teaearlgraycold2• 2 years ago

Our docker file for running some ML code at work is 6GiB. That does not include the model files. What the fuck, Nvidia? Am I downloading thousands of permutations of generated code for things I’ll never use?

baobabKoodaa• 2 years ago

*Docker image, not Dockerfile

stackskipton• 2 years ago

If you look at the build, yea, it includes everything and kitchen sink. No one cares to parse it down because in most cases, the big GPU servers running this have plenty of hard disk space and since it's a long running container image in most cases, the pull time isn't considered big enough problem for most people to fix.

Prime example of "Hardware is cheap and inefficiencies be damned"

DrFalkyn• 2 years ago

If using C++, clang and boost are going to take up a substantial portion of that 6 GB

PeterisP• 2 years ago

As far as I understand, one of things that it includes actually literally is the permutations of code adapted for every different model of supported nVidia hardware; that is a major (and desirable!) part of the driver+CUDA deployment.

rumad4• 2 years ago

I completely agree. I believe it is still not too late to set a destination for the future. But, because of the hardware breakthroughs which are good, no one thinks about software efficiency anymore. They will add another GB/TB to the specs to avoid any bottlenecks.

dale_glass3• 2 years ago

Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained?

Functionality and graphics.

For instance 'dict.words' alone on Linux is 4.8MB. Arial Unicode is a 20MB-ish font. The icon for an application I work on is 400K. The Google Crashpad handler for handling crashes is somewhere around several MB.

A 4K true color display is 138 times larger than 640x480x16 colors.

MonkeyClub• 2 years ago

> Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained?
Functionality and graphics.

And massive amounts of telemetry.

But now functionality is moving to the cloud, we'll just be stuck with gigabytes for graphics and telemetry.

berkes3• 2 years ago

Let's ask the question differently: what problems were solved?

With your examples, it could be:

- introduce global spell checker.

- have emoji?

- fix blurry icons?

- being able to search through crash logs?

- not having to switch between windows.

Do we need GBs instead of MBs for that? Why? Was that problem not fixed already? Could we not fix it in a way that didn't demand magnitudes more resources?

I'm asking, because I highly doubt that there's a technical reason that requires an improved piece of software or a solved problem,to require magnitudes more resources.

Sure, slack is far superior in UX to IRC. But could we really not get that UX without bloatware hogging my CPU, taking hundreds of MBs installation size and often biting off significant chunks of my memory? Is that truly, technically impossible?

giantrobot2• 2 years ago

While plenty of software is overly fat, you hit the nail on the head.

A Word document isn't just text and some formatting sigils. Editing isn't just appending bytes to the end of a file descriptor.

It's a huge memory structure that has to hold an edit history so undo and track changes works, the spelling and grammar checker needs to live entirely in RAM since it runs in realtime as you edit, and the application itself has thousands of not millions of allocated objects for everything from UI elements to WordArt. The rendering engine needs to potentially hold a dozen fonts in memory for not just the system but any specified but not immediately used fonts from the base document template.

It's not like Google Docs is any lighter on RAM than Word. Features require memory. Fast features are usually going to require more memory.

People can use AbiWord if they want a much slimmer word processor. They could also just use nano and Markdown if they wanted even slimmer. But a lot of people want document sharing over the Internet with track changes, grammar checking, and the ability to drag in and edit an Excel spreadsheet.

The features used in native software follow a bathtub curve. But not just one but several. No two groups necessarily use the same sets of advanced/uncommon features.

arprocter• 2 years ago

A while ago someone dropped off an old PowerBook Duo for disposal - I had to fire up Word 5.1 just for nostalgia reasons

I saw it described once that software is like a gas - it expanded to take up the space we now have

You see it with live distros too. They used to be 700MB to fit on a CD-R, but now it's getting rare to find one that'll fit on a 2GB USB; although yay for 'minimal' gaining ground

ale422• 2 years ago

A few years ago, as a 1st April joke, I set up a DOS/Windows 3.11 disk image on our PXE network boot server. It included a functional Word 6 for Windows, and the gzipped image was fitting in 12 MB... PCs back then could still boot without UEFI (and run Windows 3.11 if it was properly configured). It booted almost instantly. Same for opening Word.

Having used that version of Word when it was the latest one, I can say the current ones have quite some added functionality (lots of very tiny things, and a few bigger ones), but I'm totally sure the same could be done with 10x less memory usage if MS would care about it. But there's no incentive to do it. Computers are faster and have lots of memory, and we don't depend on floppy disks any more. It would just cost them more money. Not saying that this is a good thing (I think the opposite, especially that I start thinking that software bloat might have a non-neglectable environmental impact), but as long as nobody complains strong enough (or as long as the EU doesn't come out with an anti-softare-bloat law... seems just a dream but who knows), that wont change. And I can clearly remember I had the same bloat-software feeling when I tried Office 2000 or XP, compared to Office 97, so there's nothing so new here.

As a final note, I've recently seen the source code of MS Word for Windows 1.0 on a GitHub repo (MS released it, see original release on Computer History Museum: https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-...). It was pure C, with even very large parts of code written in assembly! But the code is really ugly... totally incomparable to current C or C++ coding standards, patterns and language capabilities.

jesse__• 2 years ago

We not only lost the way, we don’t even know the destination any more.

Hah! Good one. It's unfortunate, but true.

mihaaly3• 2 years ago

Basically what we had in Word 6 is what I use today in the newest Words.

It only takes longer to use while finding what I want among the bloated set of other things added.

masfuerte• 2 years ago

The exe for Word 2 was about 1MB. I remember it because it was by far the largest exe I had ever seen. It didn't have the red underlines for spell-checking but it did have all the other word-processing features I use now.

jedisct1• 2 years ago

Remember the QNX demo floppy?

seanparsons• 2 years ago

Yup, that felt incredible even at the time, let alone now.

nappy-doo• 2 years ago

I recreated that in grad school, also using QNX. We set it up to run a paging (POCSAG) system that you could put the floppy into any computer, hook up a DSP board and modulator, reboot the machine and you'd have a paging system. My advisor showed it to Andrew Viterbi, and got us grant.

When I went to recreate it, I contacted QNX and asked if I could speak to the guy who did the work, and he had died the year before. So, I just took apart his floppy, and figured out how he did it.

The things you can do when you invest your time 100% in something.

trollerator233• 2 years ago

What's this? Now I want to know.

tonymet4• 2 years ago

Yes because we promote blog posts on “idiomatic ruby” and “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. “Performance is less important than dev time”.

We used to have developers who took less time and wrote better code.

dustymcp• 2 years ago

I dont agree, there is way more help in terms of writing efficient code today than there was back in time, ive seen horrible code from that time which would not have been produced today.

throwaway35777• 2 years ago

What we don't teach or reward today is the behaviors and engineering process to write high quality code.

A surprising number of inexperienced developers do the following: "once I get any working solution I should immediately open a PR" and let the senior engineers tell them what's wrong with it.

When the big money leaves this field I hope there will be more pressure for people to adopt good engineering practices. I love to work with folks who put good effort into trying to make high quality changes. Personal initiative and ethics are how high quality software gets written.

tonymet4• 2 years ago

Which parts are you talking about? On one hand there is more telemetry & tooling to help improve efficiency. On the other hand developers are encouraged to build inefficient applications full of run-time checks, poor data structures and blocking RPC calls .

When I compare apps from 2000 to now it's a general decline in responsiveness and resource utilization.

Zpalmtree2• 2 years ago

These are all true

s1k3s• 2 years ago

I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.

rini172• 2 years ago

You can't use Qt?

a1o• 2 years ago

You will still be in binary sign hell and Windows Defender may wake up one day and decide your app is a virus "when it does X", which is exactly it's business case. Complaining to MS will do nothing since their online thing will check and not find anything. Boom, entire software business gone for reason out of control. Doesn't care about your signed certificate too.

injuly• 2 years ago

Qt licensing is its own mess. For commercial software, the pricing is 350-500$ per developer, per month. Seriously [1]. The company that now owns the framework doesn't seem to acknowledge the gap between big enterprises and solo developers/smaller teams.

[1] Yes, one can use Qt for commercial software without buying a license (as long as it is dynamically linked), but their marketing does everything it can to hide that fact. Also, the newer additions to Qt do not fall in this category – for those, you have to pay.

jcelerier2• 2 years ago

whenever I do native (native as in, compiled without going through some bytecode / VM / interpreter ...) apps for mac / windows / linux I don't have to do any of this, I just use Qt

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 2 years ago

But then you have to use c++ or Python, and figure out a good way to ship 10 dlls

turrini2• 2 years ago

I do as well. I program everything in C++ with Qt 6 (commercial license), compile statically where convenient, and use a single code base for all platforms (mobile, desktop, web). I handle the responsiveness of interfaces, DPI, and other micro-adjustments directly in a simple QML template.

bobajeff• 2 years ago

What about code signing. Won't people that run your programs want to do so without the OS claiming it will harm their computer?

GnarfGnarf5• 2 years ago

I use Qt, and I have to get my binary Notarized by Apple.

greenthrow• 2 years ago

"Barely any reason"... except they created and maintain the entire plarform and tooling that you're building on. And in Apple's case they give it away for free with any mac.

I'm old enough to remember when buying development tooling for DOS or Windows was $$$$$$

cma2• 2 years ago

They had a $100 yearly dev fee for ios.

glass-z13• 2 years ago

Can i borrow your compiler for a few days?

cmiles743• 2 years ago

Apple started giving away the development environment because they had such an anemic software ecosystem. They had a handful of OpenSTEP developers and a larger crowd of die-hard Mac people, the successful ones mostly moving away from the platform.

Today Apple is taking percentage of every dollar made from application developers who participate in their App store and they are making it increasingly difficult to avoid this with every release. IMHO, they are making far more dollars today than they ever did selling development hardware and SDK licenses.

mattl5• 2 years ago

You don’t have to do any of that for a native Mac app. Signing it is a good idea but not required and you can distribute it from your own website or even from GitHub/Lab where you can tell people it’s not notarized and they’ll need to command click and open it the first time.

EGreg3• 2 years ago

The reason that Apple and Microsoft require all this is also that native apps have a lot more access to the system.

cmiles743• 2 years ago

In my opinion, this will become harder and harder to do with every release of Windows and MacOS. I wouldn't count on the average customer of these vendors being willing to shop outside of their plaatform's app stores forever.

fragmede6• 2 years ago

tell people it’s not notarized and they’ll need to command click and open it the first time.

That's not realistic for Apple users who are used to ergonomic software. It's not technically required to notarize, but practically speaking, it is.

silverquiet2• 2 years ago

I work at a place that ships an app to both Apple and Microsoft Desktops (we could even do Linux is there was ever any demand for it). We use this old thing called Java which still seems to work. I don't develop it though so I guess I don't have to worry about too much of my resume getting caught up with unfashionable languages (let's face the facts about what most tech these days is trying to advance - promotions - not the state of the art).

colecut• 2 years ago

OP is obviously talking about mobile apps.

Maxatar3• 2 years ago

Java apps are not native on either macOS or Windows.

zer00eyz5• 2 years ago

Set up CC processing on the web:

How much are you going to pay stripe? 2.9% + 30¢ ... that means you have to charge 10 bucks to get down to a 6% transaction fee. Quite the price floor and an interesting cap on your pricing model!

What does managing chargebacks cost you? The moment your taking money your going to hire in customer service, or spend time dealing with CS. What happens when you get a chargeback, or do a refund? Most of the time you loose money (processing fees etc)

If your under a million bucks a year apple is 15%. If you're building a low price app or a value add app, odds are that apple is going to be a far better deal for you than doing it on your own.

tomhallett• 2 years ago

$10 = 6% fee; $5 = 8% fee. Both of which are far better than apple’s fees, so that point is a bit confusing.

Chargebacks = customer support. I agree with that, but if you have a B2C business which has any non-trivial revenue (OP is talking about word doc apps, so we’re obviously not talking about indie $2 side project apps), then you would already have CS anyway. I fully understand there is an opportunity cost with any service and where those costs get realized, but your examples don’t seem like a slam dunk in apple’s favor.

exe34• 2 years ago

Do any of these problems go away when you sell in the walled garden?

paulddraper• 2 years ago

apple is going to be a far better deal

Your math seems to show the exact opposite.

littlestymaar2• 2 years ago

Even when using Stripe (which is a premium payment service that's more expensive than most options) you'd be better off than the 15% from Apple as long as you sell for more than $2.5. And that's not even counting the up from cost that come with Apple (subscription + the need to buy a Mac).

How is chargeback being managed on Apple? I doubt they are swallowing the cost on their side, so I don't really see the difference between what'd get with a bank: you're losing the money anyway.

SiVal• 2 years ago

Does Apple charge 15% for each dollar up to a million plus 30% for each dollar above a million, or when you cross a million (in a year), do they suddenly jump to 30% of everything? IOW, if I have earned $999,999 so far this year, I have to pay Apple about $150,000. If I then make another $1 sale, do I owe a few cents more or another $150,000?

And once your rate goes to 30%, does it stay there the following year, or does the whole system reset to zero each year?

palijer2• 2 years ago

Dealing with Apple is a tax as well though.

How do you calculate a price for not being able to release your main product? Usually without clear indications of what exact interpretation of a rule you are breaking...

We've had delays of a week because of things like we mentioned "Android" in an integration setting that had been there for years.

6510• 2 years ago

The cheapest in my country is 7 cent per transaction, the most popular is 25 cents. We also don't do claw-backs.

api2• 2 years ago

The native world also refuses to create a standard UI API, making everyone use either Qt or Electron because sorry writing it over again for each platform is a hard “no.” Not even big companies do that anymore.

jwells893• 2 years ago

Why would platform maintainers want to encourage the lowest common denominator apps that such an API would undoubtedly result in (as a standardized UI API by definition cannot leverage platform strengths)?

Apps like that get made anyway but as it stands at least there’s a healthy crop of smaller/indie native alternatives which often best the behemoths in UI/UX. That would likely disappear with the addition of a standardized UI API, as it would probably also come with the abandonment of the old specialized APIs.

ryandrake4• 2 years ago

Yes. Not only are they refusing (and have been for decades) to create a standard UI API, they are 1. actively making their own UI APIs as different as possible from one another, even down to requiring different programming languages to use them, and 2. killing things that they once supported, which ease cross-platform code (both major platforms walking away from OpenGL in favor of their incompatible native APIs).

AnonymousPlanet2• 2 years ago

Not only that. There are people who go to great lengths to make sure that native apps don't work properly across desktop environments even on the same OS. They also call out anyone who dares to complain about it.

vb6sp6• 2 years ago

I'm not sharing any revenue with Microsoft for my desktop apps :)

Aaron22223• 2 years ago

I have to buy developer accounts

The Apple Developer Program is only needed for macOS if you want to do sign your binaries or distribute through the Mac App Store. And you only have to pay Microsoft if you want to publish to the Microsoft Store (or use Visual Studio if you're a company that has more than 5 Visual Studio users, more than 250 computers, or more than $1 Million USD in annual revenue).

buy certificates for signing binaries

Fair (though both Windows and macOS will run apps that haven't been signed, with more warnings of course).

share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason

Only if you use their stores (Mac App Store or Microsoft Store), and it looks like the Microsoft Store won't take any cut if you do your own payments and it's not a game.

fragmede6• 2 years ago

If you don't sign your binaries on macOS, the friction for the user to run your app is prohibitive, outside of developer-focused communities.

tppiotrowski5• 2 years ago

share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason

Does the App Store collect sales tax and remit on your behalf? If it does then I think it's worth it or face registering both in the EU and UK ($0 tax threshold) as well as 50 US states (once you hit the allowed limit) will take you a long time.

d357r0y3r• 2 years ago

30% cut for handling taxes? That's wild.

pc86• 2 years ago

If you live in the US the only entity you need to collect sales tax for is the state you live in. Despite what they may say you are under no legal obligation to collect sales tax for the other 49 states, nor the EU or UK.

cosmotic2• 2 years ago

Devil's advocate: you now get a lot of tooling for 'free', which used to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.

varispeed• 2 years ago

One off few hundred or few thousands is nothing in comparison to 30% tax.

That said, I don't know about Mac, but you can build apps using free tools - maybe in not as convenient way, but certainly you can.

I remember, because I was someone who couldn't afford Visual Studio licence and had to make do with GNU tools.

The greed of these companies put me off from developing anything.

_aavaa_3• 2 years ago

Counter offer: the tooling is ultimately for their benefit. They need the apps to make their platform what it is.

ChuckMcM• 2 years ago

Yeah that doesn't quite work. I agree that the cost of tooling has gone to nearly zero in most cases, but not giving it away will limit the people willing to even try to develop code for your platform.

modeless• 2 years ago

The problem with this argument is that the tools for proprietary platforms are inferior to the cross-platform ones in many cases. VSCode is better than XCode or Android Studio. GCC and Clang are better than MSVC. We don't need platform lock-in to subsidize good tools because the best tools are unencumbered.

I'd happily build iOS apps without XCode or any of Apple's frameworks to save the 30% fee. Heck, I'd do it even if I still had to pay the 30%, I hate being forced to use XCode.

nox101• 2 years ago

On which platform? On Apple's there cost is part of the premium you pay for the device. Cheapest Mac is $599. Cheapest windows machine is $199? $99. So arguably some of tbat $400-500 is for the extra software. Or would compare against Linux where you could also get a machine for $25

pjc502• 2 years ago

But for things like Apple notarization, you don't get the choice of not using the tooling. Besides, that transition already happened with the popularization of Free/Open software, somewhere in the early 2000s.

j452• 2 years ago

Choosing the web is great.

Choosing overly complex web frameworks is still a guilty pleasure of too many projects.

xvilka2• 2 years ago

Apple certificates are cheap compared to Microsoft. To get rid of UAC on Windows you have to buy certificate for thousands of dollars.

pquki4• 2 years ago

I don't think you "get rid of" UAC, you just put the author's name on the screen instead of unknown publisher. (And why do you need elevated privilege? Most applications don't) unless you are referring to "smart screen" which is a very different thing, although quite similar from a user's perspective.

kkarakk• 2 years ago

yeah and consequently users have been trained to ignore UAC warnings or just disable them as irritants.

jgord• 2 years ago

One of the reasons I moved to Javascript web development after many years as C/C++ dev, and after the hell of making iphone apps for Apples appstore - you dont have to get a licence, get approval or make an installer, if you ship a web 'app'.

wredue3• 2 years ago

You don’t have to do any of that for native apps either.

What on earth is happening in this comment section?

sumnole• 2 years ago

With the added bonus of being available to users across platforms.

StressedDev• 2 years ago

To be blunt, you do not have to create a developer account, sign binaries, or share 30% of your revenue with Microsoft. MS's API are not a mess in my opinion. You do have several options (traditional Win32, .NET, UWP, etc.). These options all work fairly well and are very flexible.

As for, Apple, I do not know but I suspect you can make Mac applications without a developer account. You need a developer account for iPhone. It's $99 a year the last time I looked. This is not a lot of money if you are serious about making an application.

sobellian• 2 years ago

If you don't sign your Windows installer, then the first N users to use it will get a scary pop-up message saying that the AV "protected your PC." I think you might also need do code-signing if you distribute through the MS store.

Compare with the web where LetsEncrypt just works without demanding a king's ransom.

As for the APIs, it is very easy to get into dependency hell between all the different UI technologies, .NET implementations, and target systems. Want to develop a brand new plain-old GUI app? Probably simple (although I've never tried, the web is right there). Need to develop a plugin for an existing application, or a new app for something like Hololens? Have fun.

krageon• 2 years ago

This is not a lot of money

It is a lot of money when you consider it should be free and serves exactly no purpose.

KomoD• 2 years ago

This is not a lot of money if you are serious about making an application.

Maybe not for you.

blackeyeblitzar• 2 years ago

We need freedom and privacy oriented general computing hardware and software again. Not these locked down operating systems tied to one walled garden.

matheusmoreira• 2 years ago

Just stop making apps for Apple, Microsoft, Google platforms. Truth is everything except Linux is just somebody else's digital fiefdom where we developers are but serfs and the users are even lower. It's either Linux or the web.

raincole• 2 years ago

It's either me having reading comprehension issue, or it's surprisingly unclear which certificate I need to buy to publish an app on Microsoft Store and what the minimum cost is.

Considering the whole point to have Windows is to use apps I'd expect they made the process super smooth.

timeon3• 2 years ago

How do you host your apps?

tempodox• 2 years ago

we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.

Once the beancounters at the rent-seeking companies (Apple, Microsoft, …) have figured out that web development is where all the money is, this will change rapidly. Google has already started gatekeeping the web via Chrome.

lr4444lr2• 2 years ago

I think about this a lot, and the conclusion I've come to is that the market (simply meaning the popularity) rewards features and intuitive UI above everything else. I think we've been on this trajectory for some time: getting users with less and less actual computer literacy to do more and more with computers.

rrr_oh_man• 2 years ago

While eroding that same literacy for the future generation

ip26• 2 years ago

I do wish fast and responsive UI was included in what’s rewarded

mihaaly3• 2 years ago

I wonder if market rules of satisfying user needs and demands is operational here still instead of shoving down things of user's throats ... actually no need to shove, they swallow anything shiny or coming with loud fanfare. It is spectacular what users are willing to work with, wrapping their world around the needs of the poorly made and sometimes even offensive software ...

VyseofArcadia• 2 years ago

It could be argued that it is similar to the way the market values Oreos and potato chips over broccoli and lentils.

darylteo• 2 years ago

The market rewards VALUE.

The rest are simply modifiers on that value. More intuitive UI allows users to gain value more efficiently. Performance allows users to gain value more efficiency.

Efficiency is important, but Value more so.

lr4444lr2• 2 years ago

Of course, that goes without saying. What I'm adding is the increasingly more computer illiterate expectations of the end consumer deriving the value, and the increasing functional demands he expects at his level of ability to understand the internals.

timeon3• 2 years ago

Popularity is determined by marketing. There is reason why markets are regulated.

asvitkine• 2 years ago

This just sounds like an inefficiency in Google Docs. Native software can also be inefficient, even if it's written in C or asm, if the data structures or algorithms used can't handle certain types of data well. Just in this case, the native software seems to be able to handle that file better.

fireflash38• 2 years ago

Where in that stack is the biggest loss of performance? DOM? Javascript? Browser? Or is it because everything needs to sync to the cloud as you edit it?

brabel• 2 years ago

I think it's just the way web apps are architectured. If you use vanilla JS you can make the browser render stuff really fast even if you change the DOM, as long as you do it efficiently (don't update ALL the DOM on every change!). But I bet Google uses some reactive framework that keeps a bloody copy of the whole DOM in memory, so when you throw 30MB of content into the DOM, that copy that was meant to make things faster starts being the bottleneck.

jakub_g• 2 years ago

IMO the biggest problem is simply that nothing is tested anymore on big inputs, and that frameworks and the modern way of writing code hide the complexity.

Also, in the past you had to care explicitly about how much memory you allocate etc. which stopped you to think. Now you can pretend you have infinite resources because everything happens implicitly.

Compounded with this [0]:

O(n^2) is the sweet spot of badly scaling algorithms: fast enough to make it into production, but slow enough to make things fall down once it gets there

you get what you get. Ever opened a GitHub pull request with 2000+ files changed? It hangs the M1 MBP. The solution is probably not rocket science, if someone really prioritized the fix.

[0] https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB/status/112038140670042931...

mike_hearn10• 2 years ago

It's going to be a mix of:

1. JS doesn't support multithreading, nor many other features that are useful for performance (e.g. mmap). This severely limits what you can do and makes it hard to scale up by parallelizing.

2. JS is a very pointer heavy language that was never designed for performance, so the CPU finds it harder to execute than old-school C++ of the type you'd find in Word. It's hard to design tight data structures of the kind you'd find at the core of Word.

3. The browser's one-size-fits-all security model sacrifices a lot of performance for what is essentially a mix of moral, legal and philosophical reasons. The sandbox is high overhead, but Docs is made by the same company as Chrome so they know it isn't malicious. They could just run the whole thing outside of the sandbox and win some perf back. But they never will, because giving themselves that kind of leg up would be an antitrust violation, and they don't want to get into the game of paying big review teams to hand out special Officially Legit™ cards in the same way that desktop vendors are willing to do.

4. The DOM is a highly generic, page oriented structure, that isn't well suited for app-like UIs. As a concrete example Chrome's rendering pipeline contains an absolute ton of complexity to try and handle very long static pages, like tiled rendering, but if the page takes over rendering itself like Docs does then all this just gets in the way and slows things down. But you can't opt out (see point 3).

skydhash11• 2 years ago

Or it's just using the wrong tool for the job. With Google's resources, they could build a UI framework that runs on top of OpenGL and have people download an app built with it instead. Next, we'd have people building interfaces on top of latex.

constantcrying5• 2 years ago

Where in that stack is the biggest loss of performance

Exclusively the minds of developers and the stance of management.

It is of course possible to built responsive, high quality and performance websites. But that is hard, much, much harder than to make something work, which maybe takes a few seconds to load, sometimes doesn't work quite right and can be a bit tedious to use.

oellegaard• 2 years ago

We recently moved an old page from plain html and everything generates by the backend to react and we had a drop down take several seconds to open with a thousand or so items in it. Was like 100ms to open the entire page before.

It was suggested to only display the first 100 items and let the user type in 3 characters until it started rendering.

Unfortunately this is the reality for many these days.

Of course instead we just fixed the shitty react code and it rendered instantly.

compacct27• 2 years ago

Yup. Common. With all the performance blogs focused on time to first paint and the like, React introduced a whole new category that looks a lot like this

drewcoo3• 2 years ago

A select with thousands of options sounds like terrible UX.

If the new frameworks make the problem blindingly obvious so that someone can actually justify fixing it, all the more reason to use those frameworks.

Klonoar2• 2 years ago

I can’t believe I’m arguing this, but: it actually might be fine UX?

As long as they’re sorted and I can jump with the keyboard, that bare-ass drop-down is probably going to “just work” with default behavior. Anything further and we don’t know the intended use case for the element itself, but on the surface… it could be fine.

werdnapk• 2 years ago

So use a server side rending framework such as Turbo. I've tried so many client side frameworks (what the kids tend to demand these days) and they're all slow with lots of data... except for Turbo.

a2128• 2 years ago

I may be way off-base here but this is what I imagine the problem is:

1. Company executive decides their developers need top-of-the-line hardware to remain competitive in today's market

2. Developers make web apps on their company-provided M5 Ultra Pro Max 128GB RAM powerhouse laptop

3. They never test it on their father's old 2010 family PC, or at least they don't test often/thoroughly enough to realize many parts are broken or unusable

passion__desire2• 2 years ago

Related point, do google android engineers dogfood android phones to themselves? I guess most of them would be Apple users.

silverquiet2• 2 years ago

Android encompasses $80 burner phones to what... like $2K flagships? It's a big target.

jwells893• 2 years ago

Not a Google engineer, but I do keep around a device that represents “potato” specs that I test against when doing Android development. Not a perfect solution since there’s a bevy of old/low end SoCs with varying performance characteristics, but I figure it’s better than what many are undoubtedly doing which is testing against their newish flagship and calling it a day.

I used to do the same on iOS, but came to find that performance differences on older devices there generally weren’t nearly as severe and that iOS users as a whole tend to use newer devices. When combined with reasonably well written Swift, performance on old devices generally isn’t a problem.

saagarjha4• 2 years ago

A decent number do.

mattl5• 2 years ago

So this is part of my current job: testing things on older hardware or less powerful hardware plus older but still used browsers, especially on mobile.

drewcoo3• 2 years ago

You're not off base. The article was about imagined problems.

fragmede6• 2 years ago

Also, network connections. Someone running the app off a Wifi 7 backed by symmetric gigabit fiber Internet at the office is going to have a difference experience than someone running the app at an apartment complex with a shitty wifi router on top of a shitty consumer Internet connection.

ThalesX• 2 years ago

This is easily fixable.

I develop using Dev Tools set to mobile and throttled connection. This way mobile-first responsiveness (limited screen-estate) and potential problems with bad connections are first class citizens.

Now, what usually happens is that I signal problems to the product owner and they wave them away. So I might update your third point that sometimes they do test it on their father's old 2010 family PC but it's not of concern to more relevant stakeholders.

graboid• 2 years ago

The same techniques that native apps use to process large documents should be possible in JS/WASM land, no? Given, you probably won't reach native performance, but it seems to me a snappy text editing experience even for large documents should be perfectly doable using web tech.

high_na_euv• 2 years ago

People shit on web devs, but lower lvl things arent better either - try compiling llvm

vinyl7• 2 years ago

LLVM is overly complex for what it does

logrot• 2 years ago

We aren't making software. Where making features (and bugs) for the next Friday deadline.

ornornor4• 2 years ago

I think HN audience is a little luckier in that regard, some of the people here work on very interesting and technical problems.

The rest of us and the vast majority of professional SE work for a marketing/sales person and “number of new features released this Friday” as you said.

stephc_int13• 2 years ago

My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it.

Software has been freeriding on hardware improvements for a few decades, especially on web and desktop apps.

Moore's law has been a blessing and a curse.

The software you use today was written by people who learned their craft while this free-ride was still fully ongoing.

EGreg3• 2 years ago

Now imagine same but with AI killer bot swarms. Slaughterbots. Because we could !

As long as we have COMPETITION as the main principle for all tech development — between countries or corporations etc. — we will not be able to rein in global crises such as climate change, destruction of ecosystems, or killer AI.

We need “collaboration” and “cooperation” at the highest levels as an organizing principle, instead. Competition causes many huge negative externalities to the rest of the planet.

HappMacDonald• 2 years ago

What we really need is some way to force competition to be sportsmanlike. EG: cooperating to compete, just like well adjusted competitors in a friendly tournament who actually care about refining their own skills and facing a challenge from others who feel the same way instead of cutting corners and throats to get ahead.

Cooperation with no competition subtracts all urgency because one must prioritize not rocking the boat and one never knows what negative consequences any decision one makes might prove to have. You need both forces to be present, but cooperation must also be the background/default touchstone with adversarial competition employed as a tool within that framework.

NoGravitas4• 2 years ago

You're right, but it's not just tech development, it's pervasive throughout our civilization. And solving it requires solving it almost everywhere, at close to the same time.

alerighi• 2 years ago

The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year, yet software are more and more heavy. For example just in 2010 a Linux distribution with a DE just started did consume 100Mb of RAM, an optimized version 60Mb of RAM. I remember it perfectly. I had 2Gb of RAM and did not have even a swap partition.

Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is unusable. A computer with 8Gb of RAM is barely usable. Each new software uses Electron and consumes roughly 1Gb of RAM minimum! Browsers consume a ton of RAM, basically everything consumes an absurd amount of memory.

Not talking about Windows, I don't even know how people can use it. Every time I help my mother with the computer is so slow, and we talk about a recent PC with an i5 and 8Gb of RAM. It takes ages to startup, software takes ages to launch, it takes 1 hour if you need to do updates. How can people use these system and not complain? I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster!

tomsmeding• 2 years ago

Not discounting your lament about memory use, this caught my eye:

I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster!

Sure, Windows has grown a lot in size (as have other OSes). But startup is typically bounded by disk random access, not compute power or memory (granted, I don't use Windows, if 8GB is not enough to boot the OS then things are much worse than I thought). Have you tried putting an SSD in that thing?

(And yes, I realise the irony of saying "just buy more expensive hardware". But SSDs are actually really cheap these days.)

paulryanrogers• 2 years ago

Windows 98 was often running on fragmented disks. I recall it taking minutes before I could do useful work. And having multiple apps open at once was more rare. While possible it often ended in crashes or unusable slowness.

wvenable• 2 years ago

The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year

I think that is some kind of fallacy. We are doing the same things but the quality of those things is vastly different. I collect vintage computers and I think you'd be surprised how limited we were while doing the same things. I wouldn't want to go back.

Although I will say your experience with Windows is different than mine. On all my machines, regardless of specs, start up is fast so the point where I don't even think about it.

flenserboy• 2 years ago

Think also about all the finished stand-alone applications which have been discarded because of replacement APIs, or because they were written in assembly. We had near-perfect (limited feature-wise from a 3-decade view, of course) word processors, spreadsheets, and single-user databases in the late 80s/early 90s which were, except for many specific use-case additions, complete & only in need of regular maintenance & quality-of-life updates were there a way to keep them current. They were in many cases far better quality & documented than almost any similar applications you can get your hands on today; so many work-years done in parallel, repeated, & lost. If there wouldn't be software sourcing & document interchange issues, it would be tempting to do all my actual office-style work on a virtual mid-90s system & move things over to the host system when printing or sending data.

Addition: consider also how few resources these applications used, & how they, if they were able to run natively on contemporary systems, would have minuscule system demands compared to their present equivalents with only somewhat less capability.

sydbarrett744• 2 years ago

Blame surveillance capitalism for a lot of this. All those hundreds (thousands?) of trackers running simultaneously add up.

jimmaswell• 2 years ago

I have a Macintosh Plus, SE, 7200, and iMac G3 (System 6, 6, 7, 9) I've been using for fun lately after fixing many of them up. Even with real SCSI harddrives in the SE, 7200, and iMac, they're such a joy to use compared to a modern OS. Often much more responsive, UI is always more consistent, not to mention better aesthetics. They really don't make software like they used to. A web browser or OS should not be slow on any modern hardware but here we are.

test6554• 2 years ago

Back in my day websites didn't have "dark mode" and we liked it. We didn't trust the compiler to do our optimizations in the snow (both ways). etc.

VelesDude2• 2 years ago

My daily runner is a T400 Laptop with 4GB RAM on a fairly slim Linux distro. But in the last 6-12 months it is starting to feel a little tight when it comes to anything web browsing. Even things like Thunderbird are getting very bulky in keeping up with web rendering standards.

I pulled down an Audiobook player the other day, once all dependencies were meet, it need 1.3GB to function! At least VLC is still slim.

vnuge6• 2 years ago

It was the path of least resistance, so we took it.

Well said. I believe many of the "hard" issues in software were not "solved" but worked around. IMO containers are a perfect example. Polyglot application distribution was not solved, it was bypassed with container engines. There are tools to work AROUND this issue, I ship build scrips that install compilers and tools on user's machines if they want but that can't be tested well, so containers it is. Redbean and Cosmopolitan libc are the closest I have seen to "solving" this issue

It's also a matter of competition, if I want users to deploy my apps easily and reliably, container it is. Then boom there goes 100mb+ of disk space plus the container engine.

mike_hearn10• 2 years ago

It's very platform specific. MacOS has had "containers" since switching to NeXTStep with OS X in 2001. An .app bundle is essentially a container from the software distribution PoV. Windows was late to the party but they have it now with the MSIX system.

It's really only Linux where you have to ship a complete copy of the OS (sans kernel) to even reliably boot up a web server. A lot of that is due to coordination problems. Linux is UNIX with extra bits, and UNIX wasn't really designed with software distribution in mind, so it's never moved beyond that legacy. A Docker-style container is a natural approach in such an environment.

eternityforest3• 2 years ago

Moore's law is still going, but we stopped making software slower.

We use JITs and GPU acceleration and stuff in our mega frameworks, and maybe more importantly, we kind of maxed out the amount of crazy JS powered animations and features people actually want.

Well, except backdrop filter. That still slows everything down insanely whenever it feels like it.

asp_hornet• 2 years ago

path of least resistance

Great take. It feels like the path of least resistance peppered with obscene amounts of resume driven development.

Complexity in all the wrong places.

fuzzfactor2• 2 years ago

Did we lose our way

It wasn't supposed to be like this but it looks like most people never have found the way by now.

So, misguided efforts, wasted resources, and technical debt piles up like never before, and at an even faster rate than efficiency of the software itself declines on the surface.

guestbest• 2 years ago

I disagree. It’s all the frameworks and security features like telemetry of the operating systems and those framework libraries. There are programs written in Lazarus (free pascal) that run blazing fast on windows, even the modern ones like Windows 11. Keeping the software written for a specific purpose for the desktop is the best bet for quickness and stability.

Every modernization (hardware and framework) in software is a tax on the underlying software in its functional entirety

pylua• 2 years ago

There are a lot of nuanced features that explode in complexity when joined with other features. The number of permutations is massive, and handling those combinations of requirements is what modern day software is about.

Today’s software systems are more generalized, though they are solving the same business problems, just with more details / functionality than before.

tracer4201• 2 years ago

I’m in leadership ic role at a big tec company. We pride ourselves in engineering.

hiring bar was dropped. expecting a mid level engineer to work with a byte buffer is considered “too complex” and non differentiated work.

the literal goal is to pump out features written up by mba/product team. none of these mbas use the product mind you. theyre chasing stupid features they think vice presidents want, because the thinking is it will drive promotions.

this is a cynical post and i will stop here. my org has problem of incentives. nothing else. you incentivize wrong things then this happens

claytonwramsey• 2 years ago

There is perhaps some irony in the fact that this blog was posted to Medium, which serves 10.88 MB for a 265-word article.

zer00eyz5• 2 years ago

And browsers are larger that some operating systems. And talk about a closed off ecosystem ... WASM is still crippled and JS/HTML/CSS is your only real viable option for web development.

The web feels like 2005 again. Only thing is, this time the popups are embedded in the page...

vnuge6• 2 years ago

I think I would prefer 2005 web again. I'd probably be able to see more of the internet. I use heavy DNS filtering, no javascript on untrusted sites, no cookies, no fonts, VPN and so on. With cloudflare blocking me I basically can't see the majority of websites.

apantel• 2 years ago

The ads are the real content from Medium’s perspective. The article is actually the medium by which the real content is delivered, like a train carrying dark passengers. The article is not what Medium cares about delivering to your browser, but the ads. And delivering the ads requires a lot of complexity.

Animats3• 2 years ago

The article is an ad: "*** provides uptime monitoring and flow-based monitoring for APIs."

This is an important subject, thus it's one for which clickbait is generated.

Size is a problem. I look at my Rust compiles scroll by, and wonder "why is that in there?". I managed to get tokio out, which took some effort. The whole "zbus" system was pulled in because the program asks if the user is in "dark mode". That brought in the "event-listener" system.

Lately, "bash" in a Linux console has become much slower about echoing characters. Did someone stick in spell check, or a LLM for autocomplete, or something?

collinrapp• 2 years ago

…what ads? See the last paragraph here [0].

Obviously your statement is true about most other sites, but I thought it was an odd thing to say about a platform that famously doesn’t serve ads.

[0] https://medium.com/about

Aloisius• 2 years ago

Firefox about:process reports the article taking 239 MB of memory and 0.06-0.2% of my CPU ten minutes after it finished loading - 45% of the CPU time seems to be spent in Google's reCAPTCHA.

I wish Mozilla or Google or someone aggregated statistics for cpu/memory/energy usage by domain to shame devs who clearly don't otherwise care.

kmstout• 2 years ago

It's fine in a text-mode browser.

anthk3• 2 years ago

For that I fire up a Gemini browser against gemini://gemi.dev/bin/waffle.cgi and paste the URL. For non Gemini network users, just change medium.com to scribe.rip at the URL.

anthk3• 2 years ago

A modernized Inferno for the web (with unicode) would have been much better than... this.

It looks like a joke seeing an i5 choking on files opened by PC's from 2003.

robinhood• 2 years ago

Interesting fact that this article has been posted on Medium, resulting in a 7.32 Mb page.

canucker2016• 2 years ago

I got 8.3MB on page load.

Then I got uBlock Origin to turn off JavaScript, remote fonts, and large media items.

Result: 116KB

So 98.61% of the page is extraneous...

nwah1• 2 years ago

Office 365 probably would have worked. Microsoft's proprietary format is handled best by Microsoft.

Also, cloud-based synchronization using CRDTs is a complex problem that is significantly more complex than just loading the document.

Can't claim we are going backwards when comparing apples and oranges.

nottorp2• 2 years ago

That's clutching at straws tbh. I have a "native" google docs spreadsheet that has atm 4 sheets, all at 50 lines or less. No fancy formulas except sums. It just tracks hours for billing.

It uses 500 Mb of ram fresh, and in a couple weeks it goes up to 1.5 to 2 Gb and I have to kill the tab and reopen it.

This is the modern javascript world...

nottorp2• 2 years ago

Hey I just killed a github tab that was at 1.2 Gb :)

eviks11• 2 years ago

It's not a proprietary format, nor should sync take that much in resources in UI thread

empiko• 2 years ago

Substack is a good example as well. Literally cannot render simple text and image articles without visible and annoying lags. If there are several hundred comments it can take tens of seconds to finish rendering. With functionality that was figured out in early 90s...

Ekaros• 2 years ago

I remember using Youtube with Opera GX and two adblockers not that long ago. When you scrolled deep enough in to comments writing replies to them had significant lag on input. And I mean like what felt like seconds before all presses got processed.

This is flagship product of one of the largest companies, and even they cannot get UI performance right...

ultra_nick• 2 years ago

We learned that efficiency is just one feature of many.

AdrianB1• 2 years ago

We can write efficient software, but many times we decide not to.

1. Why bother optimizing when the developer's time is more expensive than RAM and CPU power? I see this a lot.

2. From the times that I can remember (mid '80) till now, only top developers write efficiently software that is efficient. Most developers are average (this is not bad, it is just an observation) and for the average developer software optimization is too expensive in terms of time invested. Some don't know how to do it, some are not proficient enough to do it in the constraints of the projects given to them by bean-counting managers. "good enough" quality is software management is much safer than "good enough" Boeing planes, so when Boeing is cutting corners then managers of developers cut even more.

RetroTechie• 2 years ago

Why bother optimizing when the developer's time is more expensive than RAM and CPU power?

The comparison should be between developer's time, and time spent (wasted) by all users combined. This depends on # of users, and how often they run the software.

For a one-off, with a few dozen users running it occasionally, yes developer's time is expensive.

For popular software with 100M+ or billions of daily users, developer time is practically irrelevant, and spending weeks/months to shave off 1/10th of a second for each user's run, would be a no-brainer.

Most software sits somewhere in between.

But... developer is paid by company not by end users. And company cares about other things than the interests of society-at-large.

So it's mostly a case of bad incentives. Companies don't care about / aren't rewarded (enough, anyway) for saving end users' time. Open source developers might, but often they are not rewarded, period.

contextfree2• 2 years ago

Also, RAM, CPU and disk space are shared resources on PCs. If your computer is slow you don't necessarily attribute it to any particular program, let alone website. As Terry Crowley says here https://terrycrowley.medium.com/software-ecology-bb4653046fd...

"... the cost of bloat is not directly borne by the those introducing it. Individual efforts to reduce bloat have little effect since there is always another bad actor out there to use up the resource and the improvements do not accrue to those making the investments."

Johnny555• 2 years ago

One problem is that we use a full word processor that's powerful enough to typeset a book to distribute basic text documents when simple markup would be just as readable, and more easily usable on a wide variety of devices (and easier to make accessible for disabled people)

So when my doctor sends me a one page checklist of how to prepare for a procedure, I have to open it in a powerful word processor and since it's I'm not using MS Word, the fonts and formatting aren't as expected.

rahen• 2 years ago

Not until long ago, we had RTF, a simple and universal rich text format that was free, simple and available on all platforms.

On Windows, Wordpad was plenty enough for most needs, came preinstalled for free and barely consumed any resources, but I understand it's no longer shipping with Windows. Office 365 is now where the money is, even for basic needs.

anthk3• 2 years ago

Get ReactOS' ISO. Mount it or extract it with 7zip.

Find the biggest CAB file, it weights lots of MB. Extract it. Copy Wordpad.exe anywhere else. Delete the rest if you want, or enjoy Sol.exe and friends.

cmiles743• 2 years ago

I wonder if it's the big software vendors who have lost their way, rather than the average software developer. We have companies like Microsoft and Adobe moving to Web based applications not because they are better but because it's easier for them to enforce licensing restrictions and push people into subscriptions. As the various App stores erode the profits of software developers any tool that will make it faster to add features, even if they are buggy, becomes compelling.

lispisok• 2 years ago

The real problem this guy is encountering is making interactive applications for a web browser is hammering a square peg through a round hole at its core. That's why performance is bad, that's why there is a new framework every other week trying to find a better workflow with better abstractions. There is so much inertia, such a huge ecosystem, many billions of dollars invested in it trying to make it less bad so it's not going away.

jeffbee• 2 years ago

No, but apparently the arts of rhetoric and reason are completely dead. There is a big gap in this blog post somewhere between "a given program is not optimized for a specific use-case" and "we lost our way of developing optimized, efficient, and performance-wise applications".

geor9e• 2 years ago

Google Docs might be able to directly edit .docx files now, but that is pretty new feature, and it doesn't surprise me that it's slow. It's a proprietary format owned by Microsoft. The argument that software ought to be efficient is valid, but the example of editing a non-native format seems unfair. Any time you add emulation layers you should expect things to slow down.

Did you consider trying Microsoft's own browser-based Word editor? It's free too. And .docx is it's native format.

Or, consider doing a conversion to Google Docs native format first (you'll lose some formatting though, possibly a lot of it).

gnabgib• 2 years ago

.docx (office open xml) is an open published ECMA standard[0], and lots of other apps include support[1], including google which added editing without conversion in 2019[2]

[0] https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML#Application_su... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/10/18304978/google-docs-shee...

eviks11• 2 years ago

But you're not emulating, you're just parsing a file format, so why should you expect slow downs?

michelb2• 2 years ago

In my MacOS Passwords I have ±3400 entries. A roughly 341KB CSV. Searching in that list in the preference panel or Keychain app is dog-slow on my M1 Pro Studio or on my M3 MacBook Air. How??

constantcrying5• 2 years ago

It seems obvious how you could make it slow. Just naively iterate over the entire series of objects looking up the name for each.

This is the obvious low effort, low complexity solution. Of course you could make it fast, but that would take time and effort for a feature most people won't notice.

anonymoushn2• 2 years ago

Your proposed solution would run in less than 1ms though.

michelb2• 2 years ago

I agree on the priority here, but this looks like an OS component that appears in other apps. Filtering history in Safari is equally slow.

skydhash11• 2 years ago

SwiftUI and Catalyst. Somebody has probably implemented that list and try to rebuild the app UI at every keystroke (I think the UI is a single thread on macOS). There are optimizations, but that requires being aware that beneath the declarative world, it's an imperative foundation.

eviks11• 2 years ago

No, it's been slow long before that, that's just one of the many abandoned apps from the golden age of efficiency and superior UI

bouke• 2 years ago

When the first MacBooks came out with a Secure Enclave, Keychain was just unworkable slow. You had to type your search query elsewhere and then paste it in, or you’d be looking at a beachball for minutes. Took them a major OS X release before it became somewhat bearable again.

The new Passwords is a joke. UX errors all over the place, modal based view with a toggle to start editing. If you need to enter a password in another area of System Preferences, you need to back out of the auth flow, switch to Passwords and copy the credentials over to a temporary file.

slyu• 2 years ago

Similar observations from the history of video game making. Historical archives like the making of Prince of Persia illustrates the art of constraint

https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/books/journals/

vnuge6• 2 years ago

I hope to keep seeing posts like these. I believe software "bloat" is a serious issue that should be handled, however if you look at SWE job listings it's not even remotely a concern for employers IMO. Your encouraged to understand complex and heavy frameworks and performance/optimization is not even a consideration.

skydhash11• 2 years ago

Because those frameworks are easy at first glance. Adding some interactions with React is easier than with jQuery. Even better if you could make the whole page a React app, then you can add those 100s libraries to do…stuff. Optimizing a React app is hard and it will probably require some deep thinking about global state and its modification and we don't have time for that /s.

By then, the app is built and running. Even though the code is a mess because the developer only know about React, nothing about the DOM and software architecture.

vnuge6• 2 years ago

To your last point, I like to think of modern professional software development as a trade, it's not much of a science anymore imo. For me it's outside looking in.

fnordpiglet• 2 years ago

This seems to take a moral stance that efficient is better. However that’s not always practically true. Efficiency often means inflexible and brittle with respect to change and time. Abstraction generally trades efficiency for ease in change over time, or parsimony for the developer in exchange for expense at runtime.

If it doesn’t matter - it doesn’t matter. If the goal is making a document format that is flexible enough to accommodate history, concurrent editing, various layouts and embedding, etc, all this comes with abstractions that add inefficiency. The trade off is ease in adding and changing to the format and the software that consumes and produces the format. If the consequence in the real world is effective unobservable in any material way, who cares?

Maybe as a moralistic measure it’s offensive that something lacking parsimony is practical. But from any meaningful measure - the users perspective, the developer, even the company paying for the processing - if it doesn’t matter - it literally doesn’t matter.

Comparing Google Docs to a program hosted on an Apollo era flight computer is obtuse to an extreme, and I would rather write my collaboratively edited documents with Google Docs than Apollo era flight computer any day no matter whether one is less parsimonious than the other.

rpdillon2• 2 years ago

Maybe as a moralistic measure it’s offensive that something lacking parsimony is practical. But from any meaningful measure - the users perspective, the developer, even the company paying for the processing - if it doesn’t matter - it literally doesn’t matter.

Except the post you're responding to was literally in response to a user problem trying to edit a 30MB document in Google Docs. So it very much does matter, from the user perspective.

Comparing Google Docs to a program hosted on an Apollo era flight computer is obtuse to an extreme, and I would rather write my collaboratively edited documents with Google Docs than Apollo era flight computer any day no matter whether one is less parsimonious than the other.

Straw man. The post compares Google Docs to LibreOffice (a competing product), and points out that LibreOffice solves the user's problem (editing a 30MB document) and Google Docs cannot.

drewcoo3• 2 years ago

Did we lose our way in arriving at the file size non-goal?

No.

contextfree2• 2 years ago

I liked this post by Terry Crowley: https://terrycrowley.medium.com/software-ecology-bb4653046fd...

"The classic response to accusations of bloat is that this growth is an efficient response to the additional resources available with improved hardware. That is, programmers are investing in adding features rather than investing in improving performance, disk footprint or other efforts to reduce bloat because the added hardware resources make the effective cost of bloat minimal. The argument runs that this is in direct response to customer demand.

It is most definitely the case that when you see wide-spread consistent behavior across all these different computing ecosystems, it is almost certainly the case that the behavior is in response to direct signals and feedback rather than moral failures of the participants. The question is whether this is an efficient response.

The more likely underlying process is that we are seeing a system that exhibits significant externalities. That is, the cost of bloat is not directly borne by the those introducing it. Individual efforts to reduce bloat have little effect since there is always another bad actor out there to use up the resource and the improvements do not accrue to those making the investments. The final result is sub-optimal but there is no obvious path to improving things."

Web pages/applications are probably even worse in this regard because I'm not sure users even conceptualize them as using resources on their local computers, so they don't get blamed for it (people seem to attribute resource usage only to the web browsers, not the sites themselves)

KayL• 2 years ago

Wait, is it true? Did you encounter a bug? or browser extensions issues? It may not be as efficient as native, but I downloaded some sample files and repeated them until hit Google Docs limits. It is about 450 pages with some images. It is smooth and usable. There's zero delay. (and only 1000MB ram usage with many broswer extensions enabled. I think it's fair...)

constantcrying5• 2 years ago

Who knows how exactly that word looks. Might be Features from word which it is badly emulating.

rumad4• 2 years ago

The doc file has images, and some simple tables but mostly texts.

emorning3• 2 years ago

If AI was a real thing, instead of phony baloney probabilistic bullsh!t, then we'd already have AI-driven tools that take crappy, bloated, slow, but correctly working systems built by humans and turn them into smaller, faster, correctly working AI-enhanced systems.

Right?

patrulek• 2 years ago

What if current AI is also crappy, bloated and slow?

clircle• 2 years ago

Dad wants to work on a doc file, so why tf didn't OP install MS Word?

Zpalmtree2• 2 years ago

Dude just increase your development costs 10x because apps sometimes run slow

mihaaly3• 2 years ago

Perhap we should compare the cost of development - and maintenance - for an efficient classic software and a bloated and modern one once ... ; ))

(probably the cost of making an ancient Word and the newest one... : )) but there could be lots of other examples of 'modern' ones made along current trends vs. similar feature set classic ones, I wonder how this cost characteristic would play out .... : ) )

eternityforest3• 2 years ago

We did lose the way, and then we found it again. Not everything has caught up yet but a lot has.

Moore's law kept going, and software started getting a little bit faster, which was enough to stop undoing the gains made by hardware, and now things are back to mostly snappy.

Occasionally you'll get a 30mb file that's slow... but subjectively things sure seem better than 10 years ago when you couldn't even think about optimization without someone beating you over the head with a "premature optimization is the root of all evil" quote.

nocman2• 2 years ago

and now things are back to mostly snappy.

This is the inverse of my experience. There are few applications that have a UI that I would refer to as 'snappy'. In fact, I am trying to come up with a single example, and atm I can't even think of one.

eternityforest3• 2 years ago

All mainstream apps are vast on recent Android phones. Most everything on recent Ubuntu is fast.

Most mobile sites in general are fast, maybe not "2kb of HTML" fast, but fast enough I don't notice or think about performance when browsing.

Although, I suspect a lot of programmers can think faster than average and seem to be bothered more by small delays than the rest of us, since they're able to do things like figure out a Vim keystroke sequence instantly.

constantcrying5• 2 years ago

Again and again people complain about this. But it remains a fact that essentially nobody actually wants this.

Developers certainly like to have their completely integrated, connected and universal computing platform (the web). And users do not seem to particularly care about performance as long as it is good enough. And that is exactly the standard that is set, software is allowed to be so bad that it doesn't really annoy the user too much. Management doesn't care either, certainly creating good software isn't important when good enough software has already been developed.

Sure, I would like things to be different, but until one group decides that a drastic departure is necessary, nothing will change. There are also no real incentives for change, from any perspective.

impossiblefork• 2 years ago

Do we really though?

Web developers do of course, but I've hardly touched web development myself. Web interfaces etc., are a choice, but I think it's driven by commercial needs-- a desire for subscription revenue instead of one-time sales, etc.

Much of the modern cloud-based or half-online world is quite unnatural from a user perspective, and where there is no need for monetisation-- for example with OpenOffice, the software can expected to remain a desktop application.

constantcrying5• 2 years ago

Certainly there has been almost no pushback. I don't think most users really care for native applications, what they like to see is clicking on something and having it work instantly, web apps deliver that.

edanm4• 2 years ago

Web developers do of course, but I've hardly touched web development myself. Web interfaces etc., are a choice, but I think it's driven by commercial needs-- a desire for subscription revenue instead of one-time sales, etc.

This is certainly a big part of it, but it's not the whole story.

For one thing, there were ways to achieve those business models with native software too - "web-based=subscription" isn't actually a requirement, or the only way to go.

But users in the early 2000s, many of them more technical than users today, rejected this idea. It felt like native apps had to cost money one time, and doing otherwise would be wrong. But with Web, since users understood that it was hosted elsewhere, it "made sense" for it to be a subscription, so users went with it.

This also affected the technical things as well. Auto-updating was incredibly frowned upon in the 2000s - you bought it, you got to keep it as-is. So companies had to work very hard to keep multiple versions working all the time.

Most of these biases by technical users have gone away. We now have auto-updating subscription native apps, e.g. Photoshop works that way today. But these technical biases drove the usage of the web, because it was so much technically easier for businesses, and allowed much better business models.

(And, and this isn't even getting into the whole "installing software was really hard for users" thing!)

SkyPuncher• 2 years ago

Yep. The most successful startup I worked at had a SPA that downloaded 5MB bundle and preloaded a bunch of data. Took nearly 10 seconds to startup.

Nobody complained about that. In fact, few people complained about a few portions of the app that had abysmal performance. It often wasn’t until 60 second load times that customers started complaining.

They still raved and raved about that software because it solved an extremely valuable problem for them. A job that took literally a week could now be done in minutes.

As the space heated up, we needed to improve some things, but most people literally did not care. It would always be stack ranked last in the list.

trgn• 2 years ago

Startup time of an SPA is meaningless when it's for the sort of app you open once in the morning and then use during the rest of the day. It's a single startup-hit, and the user suffers it in between closing the tabs from the previous day and fiddling with some emails. Doesn't matter it is 10-20 seconds.

The problem with the long startup is that it tends to cloud any discussion on performance. Code loading and parsing is basically the biggest bar in the app-perf breakdown of your profiles, and thus spins this narrative that this is the thing to optimize for, because it's the biggest bang. Rather than say, responding to user selections, reducing jitter and sluggishness while scrolling, etc...

I'm starting to believe that for a large class of apps, developers should look at it as if they are writing video games: the user will tolerate the spinner before the level, but then it needs to be silky smooth after. And the _smooth after_ requires a whole class of other optimizations; it's striving for a flat memory profile, it's small ad-hoc data transfer, it's formatting data into usable layout at lower levels in the stack, it's lazy loading of content in the background, etc... Those are the areas where web-devs should be looking a

(again, this only applies for that sort of SPA; e.g read-only content, blogs and such, should display _fast_).

yen2232• 2 years ago

"They still raved and raved about that software because it solved an extremely valuable problem for them. A job that took literally a week could now be done in minutes."

This is a big point isn't it.

We seem to think that customers are choosing "slow" over "fast", when a lot of times they are really choosing between "slow" vs "manual" (i.e. very very slow)

metalspoon2• 2 years ago

The blog is flawed. 33MB is likely no problem for the web. It's just that Google Docs devs haven't cared about that size probably because hardly anybody creates a huge doc on their platform. Or maybe his dad created a complicated doc file that G Doc failed to parse.

That's different from us devs losing efficiency from our deployment platform.

II2II• 2 years ago

I suspect a few things are going on here.

This is not exactly a new phenomena. People have been complaining about software bloat since at least the mid-1990's. I suspect someone older than myself would gleefully explain that the complaint's went back to the mid-1980's, mid-1970's, etc.. Eventually it gets to the point where only outliers will complain. Everyone else will simply upgrade, put up with the bloat, or stick with old software.

Then there is the question of whether the bloat is worth the benefits. If Docs was a simply a clone of Word, few people would have adopted it. Some people use it because it is free, others since they want to work on or access their documents from various devices, yet others want to collaborate on documents seamlessly. If you're getting something out of the bloat, you're less likely to think of it as bloat.

We also have to consider that some bloat isn't really bloat. It's easy to point to AppleWorks on the Apple II then bemoan how modern word processes require about five orders of magnitude more resources, while ignoring how resource intensive the niceties are. Want to use proportional fonts that look nice at any size and have them rendered properly on the screen? That's about three orders of magnitude more video memory, additional CPU and use for rendering the text, etc.. I'm using that example since it is something people can actually see. Now consider the things they cannot see (such as working on documents larger than the computer's main memory, the memory required for Unicode fonts, the ability to switch between the working document and research notes, memory protection to prevent an ill behaved application from wiping out all of your work). Yes, bloat exists. On the other hand, a lot of the increased resource use is actually quality of life improvements.

Anarch157a• 2 years ago

What people also forget is that if Windows 11 requires 8GB of RAM while Windows 98 only required 8MB, that's 3 orders of magnitude. If we adjust the size of our modern "bloated" applications using the same scale, an app that today takes 100MB on disk, would be equivalent to a just 100KB in 1998, an Electron app that uses 1GB of memory would be equivalent to one that took only 1MB 30 years ago.

Apps today are no more bloated than they were last century, while we gained a lot of functionalities that would have been considered witchcraft in the days of Win98.

somenameforme• 2 years ago

You're saying two very different things. Nobody actually wants this is not the same as nobody is actually moving forward to achieve this. Performance is something like a tragedy of the commons. Because everybody is just doing what's in their own short term interests, but the long-term consequence is where we are today: you'd need what would literally have been a supercomputer, not that long ago, to run a word processor.

It's kind of funny to imagine this parallel world where you send a PC of today back to the 70s. Whichever government got their hands on it would be keeping it ultra classified and hiding it away, like it was some device, too dangerous for the public, that could computationally solve any problem imaginable, create anything imaginable.

VelesDude2• 2 years ago

The area I feel this difference the most is when you use software that didn't fall into this trap. Things like MYOB EXO/CRM, SAP ERP systems have code bases stretching back decades that innovate at a glacial pace. As such it is basically 2000's tech that we are forced to still use and that has turned into its big advantage.

It is always fun to put up the task managed on these to see them using 20-30MB of RAM with a large part of that being the current data base loaded in.

VLC & Blender are other examples of this.

austinjp• 2 years ago

I take your point, but people certainly do complain about performance and download sizes, they just do it indirectly by describing the side effects. Only recently my partner asked me why her laptop got so hot. An iPhone user I know said they hate it when their phone got "screen freeze", in other words when it became unresponsive. They didn't describe it in terms of performance or app size, even though those are the underlying problems. Anyone trying to download a large app on a phone with poor signal will get frustrated, and people who live in areas with unreliable internet experience third daily. People on low incomes or living in developing nations can often only use older devices which get clogged up with large, slow apps and become frustrating to use.

If you feel that people don't care about performance and download size, you may be asking the wrong people the wrong questions.

eezing• 2 years ago

Google Docs is pretty efficient. It loads incredibly fast and you never have to manually update it. But, it clear has limits… 30MB Word files.

egypturnash• 2 years ago

“My father told me he wanted Microsoft Word on his laptop. So I told him to use Google Docs instead. When that turned out to suck, I installed Libre Office instead.”

Why didn’t you just, like, get him Word? Why did you make him try to use a shitty web app that assumes everyone’s computer is brand new, then install an open-source program that’s going to be constantly playing catch-up with Word’s updates and may cause problems down the line when Dad wants to work with someone else’s Word docs?

Maybe there was a perfectly good reason for this choice. I can think of a few. Maybe you helped Dad enter The Year Of Linux On The Desktop recently. Maybe Dad didn’t want to pay for Office. Who knows. Whatever the reason, you didn’t put it in this post. And you ended it with a plug for your completely unrelated SAAS, too.

rumad4• 2 years ago

My dad didn't want to pay for the Office. I might ended my story badly. Sorry about that. But, I don't agree with that the SaaS is not related. It is. API optimization is also important and it can directly affect the performance of web apps and even native apps.

Update: I updated the article.

YurgenJurgensen2• 2 years ago

Aren't Microsoft trying their best to turn Word (and the rest of Office) into a shitty web app?

rqtwteye• 2 years ago

Totally. It’s getting difficult in Outlook to figure where window boundaries are. A lot of menus also look pretty amateurish compared to native menus.

can16358p2• 2 years ago

I think convenience is the keyword. Users (not us HN crowd, the rest of the world) don't want to struggle with installing software, most of them don't know the difference between Internet, Browser, or "app".

They just open up "internet" and work on docs, and for 99% of the cases Google Docs works fine despite running in a browser that is much less efficient than a native "app". For most cases it's more than enough for the regular user who is used to "computers being slow" anyway.

rumad4• 2 years ago

I also love to use and prefer native apps. But, in my case, I had to offer Google Docs to my dad. Because he wanted to transfer his doc file to his work computer to continue to work on it when he is at the office. So, I thought a web app might be good for him.

can16358p2• 2 years ago

Sure it's a perfectly normal thing. I'm talking about Google side of things: they're probably not caring about performance when dealing with 30MB large docs as it's not what people use in their docs anyway.

xg15• 2 years ago

Yes.

rpdillon2• 2 years ago

It's interesting: minimal software is out there, but folks don't tend to choose it. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to be conservative in my dependencies, and this encourages a lightweight stack that tends to perform pretty well. These days, I'm favoring tools like Lua, SQLite, Fennel[0], Althttpd[1], Fossil[2], and the Mako Server[3] and find that great, lightweight, stable, efficient software is to be had, for free, but you have to go a bit off the beaten path. This isn't stuff you hear about on Stack Overflow.

In terms of frontend, which the post focuses on (Google Docs and a 30MB doc), I guess I'm conflicted. While I tend to favor native apps + web pages, I'm also a daily Tiddlywiki user, and I really think web apps have their place (heck, one idea I'm working on is a lightweight local server that lets you run web apps like Tiddlywiki). But without a doubt, Tiddlywiki is more resource intensive than Emacs (my go-to for notetaking when I'm not on TW). My tab for a 6MB Tiddlywiki file uses 155MB of RAM, and my (heavily customized, dozens of open buffers) Emacs session uses 88MB. So I do think the author has a good point.

[0] https://fennel-lang.org/ [1]: https://sqlite.org/althttpd/doc/trunk/althttpd.md [2]: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki [3]: https://makoserver.net/

thefaux• 2 years ago

Lua is by far the most under-appreciated programming tool that I am aware of. Mastering Lua is one of the best ways to level up your programming skills. Of course it can be misused, but it is almost shocking how small and efficient Lua programs can be compared to most other languages.

codingdave• 2 years ago

I think we lost our way of developing optimized, efficient, and performance-wise applications.

I'm not going to deny that we could do better, but it is more nuanced than that:

OP uses Word as an anecdotal example, but Word is not designed with a goal of being optimized. It is designed with a goal of being backwards-compatible to decades of history.

We cannot assume that all software shares the same goals because they simply do not. When we look at the problem any given software is trying to solve, performance optimization is almost always important, but almost never #1... #1 is "solve the problem". Doing it fast is always secondary to doing it at all.

eviks11• 2 years ago

So why doesn't Excel solve the famous problem of data loss on importing dates?

Also, Word (despite the general fame) isn't compatible with decades of history (remember a post that found that LibreOffice was more compatible with history (though not current designs))

jongjong2• 2 years ago

The answer is yes. Software developers themselves have lost the ability to recognize or value efficient architecture. Software architects have been wiped off the face of the earth and replaced by a combination of script kiddies and scrum masters. Fast forward 10 years, we can see the results. Now we just have to wait to see what happens 10 years from now.

Sad for me who wanted to be a software architect. I had to watch all this unfold in real time from inside various companies and never had the ability to fix the problems. Last time I tried to prevent major architectural flaws from being implemented in software during the design phase, I couldn't convince management and had to quit the company... Then 2 years later, from the outside, I witnessed the project turn into a complete failure. They literally abandoned the whole thing and started using a competitor's platform... Which, to rub salt into the wound, is almost just as awful.

nyarlathotep_• 2 years ago

Non-sarcastic question--how do you define "software architect"?

Typically the "architect" title I see thrown around today pertains to gluing together some abominations of "systems", typically cloud services to do web stuff at "scale"

Architect today seems == "cloud infrastructure decision maker" and has no bearing on the code written, libs/frameworks/whatever used

jongjong2• 2 years ago

Infrastructure could be considered part of architecture but also, it should include other aspects such as how the code is organized on a per-project basis; what frameworks are used, how data should flow through the system, how the different modules are organized to form a functioning product that is resilient to requirement changes.

j452• 2 years ago

The way mislead a long time ago when too many projects selected a framework that was way more complex and heavy than what they were solving.

There are some new simplified approaches that are starting to be interesting again.

quonn• 2 years ago

The problem is really the business side or pressure from management. 30 Years ago if the software was not efficient it would be either dog slow or just not work at all.

Now it is merely not elegant or not as fast as it could be or at least fast enough initially during development and so no effort is spent on making it better.

I believe this could only be fixed through regulations which either make the engineers liable (thereby empowering them to make decisions) or by regulating energy use and user experience.

If we don‘t want this, then things will just be the way they are now.

qingcharles• 2 years ago

Anyone have good recommendation for a Web-based Google Sheets alternative that isn't killed by a spreadsheet with 50K rows?

osigurdson• 2 years ago

Unexamined phrase based development ("root of all evil") is likely responsible for a lot of it.

ab8• 2 years ago

It is interesting to see most people lay the blame at the feet of developers.

The reality is that these are all business decisions:

1) Move to the cloud because the business likes the steady payout of subscriptions. Business customers love not having to hire IT teams and demand six 9s of uptime because it is someone else’s responsibility. But performance needs to just be acceptable to end users.

2) Customers refusing to upgrade on-premises software, that led to long maintenance cycles and endless patches

3) Developing once for the web vs. Multiple times for different platforms – each needing its own developers and testers.

No amount of expertise on the part of developers is going to address these fundamental forces.

teeray• 2 years ago

Customers refusing to upgrade on-premises software

After a certain period of time, that software worked just fine for those customers. Photoshop is a great example. Sure, you won’t get the flashiest features, but CS4 will still work for you on a Win7 machine without any additional fees paid.

ryandrake4• 2 years ago

Once I commit to buying a version of Software X, I'm happy with it. As a user I expect Software X to work as-installed for decades to come. I don't want new features. I don't want the UX to change on me all of a sudden. I don't want it to get slower. Bugfixes and security fixes are fine, as long as everything else remains the same. I wish more developers understood and respected this.

worksonmine• 2 years ago

You can have efficient web apps running on the cloud, it's just a server after all. The issue lies with developers developing on machines their users can't afford and not caring about performance and efficient code.

ausbah• 2 years ago

i think many developers would make these same decisions. it’s painful to have to maintain separate platform versions of the same software, dealing with servers takes away development time, etc

bitwize4• 2 years ago

Even John Carmack has come around now to saying that the primary focus of a software developer should be delivering value to customer. If that can be done using up a gigabyte of memory, and using a gigabyte costs less to deliver than using 50 MiB, so be it. Software is a business. Development=cost, happy customers=profit. Anything that maximizes the latter and minimizes the former is a win. Deal with it.

trollerator233• 2 years ago

Source?

bitwize4• 2 years ago

For the Carmack quote? His interview with Lex Fridman. This excerpt has it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rczu8kc8JZA I think the meat starts around 6:50, but really watch the whole thing. It's Carmack talking about what Carmack does best.

xvilka2• 2 years ago

Yes. And Electron is the pinnacle of this.

darepublic• 2 years ago

I always didn't care for google docs. I wonder though how one would go about achieving good word editor performance on a 30mb doc file in the browser.

mif• 2 years ago

Reminds me of some of the remarks Joe Armstrong made a while ago [1], and which I came across via another submission a couple of weeks ago (which escapes me). It’s a great talk about the physical limits of computers and computation.

[1] https://youtu.be/lKXe3HUG2l4?si=nMkDTMfvBK1AKCYI

shpx• 2 years ago

Web apps are much faster to install and update.

1) Your browser is always open, whereas you need to close your current app and open the app store app

2) Google Search is better at giving you what you want in the fewest number of keystrokes than any search from any other company including app store search boxes

3) installing a "web app" is one click after the google search results or if someone posts a link. As you might know from social media, even one click is a lot and most people won't click links in a comment. In the apple app store i have to tap on the app in the search result, tap install, double click the lock button, scan my face then wait many seconds. Some websites load in many seconds but that's not that common and it's considered a bad website

4) software is reinstalled on each use, meaning it's always updated. Native apps update randomly with a big delay and I have to check if there's an update manually sometimes

5) with native software there's a risk it will not support your device. Risk is commonly expressed as a cost, so the fact that in my life I've searched for an app and found out that it's not supported on iPad or not supported in my country can be counted as every single app store download since then took me .1 seconds longer because I now know there's a risk I will waste my time looking for the app. Web apps also don't work sometimes but it's more predictable since it's usually tied to real limitations like the screen size of your device. Another risk is malware, I feel nervous and powerless when installing native software because I don't know who I'm giving access and to and to what, whereas I understand what web apps can track. and also the fact that it's HTML and JavaScript instead of opaque assembly instructions makes ad blockers possible and cheap

Installation is an integral part of using software, and a big the reason the web won and continues to win.

rTX5CMRXIfFG2• 2 years ago

Lol stop putting the web on a pedestal like we don’t have to go through hoops just to reject cookies

stack_framer• 2 years ago

Thanks to Brave[0], I can't remember the last time I had to reject cookies.

[0] https://brave.com/privacy-updates/21-blocking-cookie-notices...

ornornor4• 2 years ago

2) Google Search is better at giving you what you want in the fewest number of keystrokes than any search from any other company including app store search boxes

That seems to be contrary to the general opinion (at least on HN): google has become utterly irrelevant, serving mostly content farm AI generated junk type of blogspam, and google is more concerned about ad revenue than anything else (including results quality)

edanm4• 2 years ago

I mean, this is a very HN-bubble thought. Even if people here actually think that, just look at Google's revenue or usage numbers. Clearly a "few" people are still using it!

People here might say that Google has gotten terrible, but I would bet 99% of HNers still user Google dozens of times a day, just like everybody else in the world.

prmoustache3• 2 years ago

The big problem with the software industry, is it is working with a developer first, not customer first approach. Every technology or process is chosen for the benefit of the developers, to save them time, not for the end user.

Some will argue that it is indirectly benefitting the users who can get more features quicker. But most people care more about stability and not having to upgrade their computer yet again than features.

franciscop• 2 years ago

"But most people care more about stability and not having to upgrade their computer yet again than features."

Gonna need some data on that assertion, since there is surely some "balance point", that probably depends on the industry/software, it's not all to one or the other.

As a personal example, these days I've been using Apple Pages (or whatever is called) and it crashes around once in an hour. But it has some features that allows me to quickly iterate over some document, so I am back to cmd+s as in the old days, vs using LibreOffice interface where it would take me an estimate 2x-5x more time.

p0w3n3d3• 2 years ago

In my opinion, the reason is purely economic. Writing software in web frameworks (even a phone app, which is often written in javascript and runs in a separate browser which takes up to 300MB of RAM at the very start) is much faster, has a less steep learning curve, shorter test loop, and faster and easier release cycle. Additionally, recently every company has tried to move to SaaS business because it's giving more steady income (pay 60$/month or 10$/month but with a promise to pay the whole year, which vendor-locks a user)

While I've been involved in releasing both types of software (a ye olde Windows standalone app written in Qt framework and the new software that's being released every 2-3 days or so) I find the new way much less painful. I couldn't imagine releasing a Qt app in such a cycle (how to do updates? maybe like Minecraft - every other launch there's a new package of 64MB downloaded)...

...but as a user, I feel much more comfortable when code is on my computer, available for me to run. While extensively using Google Docs to share documents with my wife (calendar, spreadsheets) and band (songlist, lyrics), I'm scared that if I moved everything to on-cloud (paid mail, photo enhancing (thankfully I'm a standalone Lightroom buyer), vector graphics (inkscape user), photoshop (gimp user), etc.) one day I would hit the roof in payments of my per-month-but-bound-to-year plans. In 2030 it would be also netflix, shmetflix, televisionix, phonix, car-as-a-service, heated-seats-as-a-service, air-conditioning-as-a-service, toilet-as-a-service, smartwatch-as-a-service etc. building up to an unbearable rent for something that used to be free or paid once. I don't feel like my duty is to provide a constant supply of money to my beloved corporations

manquer• 2 years ago

We have always been making more efficient software than ever before .

It is just a different kind of efficient, there is economic incentive in making software development process more efficient and not that much incentive for making software itself efficient .

Software development is more accessible to millions and millions of new developers due to the work on higher level languages, frameworks , IDEs , libraries , low code , copilots and so on .

Each of these innovations made software development more efficient (not necessarily faster ) .

Nobody buys or uses software because it is faster , only cheaper .

miyuru• 2 years ago

Doogle Docs is mentioned in the article, but Google Drive is way worse.

Try to upload a folder with 20+ small files(say a picture galley) it takes a lot of time to process and upload them. If you add a new file to the folder and try to upload the folder, it will need to upload the whole thing again.

TrackerFF• 2 years ago

Not sure how bad it is these days, but a couple of years ago I was training a CNN and decided to just upload the data (images for training and testing) to my google drive folder - as I used google colab for development.

It was slow as molasses - unusable, really, and we're not talking about huge amounts of data either.

At least then, it seemed to be the google drive i/o that was the bottleneck, and the solution was to upload the training files to the colab session / VM.

jillesvangurp2• 2 years ago

Making software efficiently is more valuable than making more efficient software. Making software inefficiently takes a lot of time and people's time is expensive. A good example of an expensive use of time is optimizing something that doesn't really need optimizing. I know a lot of people go OCD on this stuff and I've been there and done that myself. But it mostly does not matter a lot in terms of value of the software.

Anyone that can't be bothered to update their ten year old laptop because it's slow is also not going to spend a lot on faster software. There's just not a lot of money in optimizing stuff. And if you have a modern laptop, it doesn't really benefit a lot from the type of optimizations you'd do to make things run smooth on a ten year old laptop. Especially when optimizations are simply about turning stuff off that aren't really in the way on the faster laptop. Like having some cheap 3D effects, pretty colors and animations, etc.

Anyway, I'm old enough to know that this is not a new debate. We never lost our way on this front. It was always like this even when computers were several orders of magnitude slower.

p0w3n3d3• 2 years ago

the decision to shift towards web apps and electron apps is mostly because of the cheapness of the development, and binding to service-oriented architecture thus monthly payment... in other words: money

jillesvangurp2• 2 years ago

That kind of is the point. That's just the latest iteration of this. You could have made the same argument about writing a business application in visual basic vs. writing something in C/C++. The latter required more time and skills. Both of which cost money. Which is why visual basic was so popular. It's also why cobol caught on in the sixties even though there were more optimal things around even then. And hardware was still really expensive.

vardump• 2 years ago

33 MB file, that's probably docx, thus it's actually a ZIP'ped collection of XML-files. Could well be 200 MB uncompressed.

Once all that XML is naively loaded as nodes, we might be talking about more than 1000 MB of RAM usage.

nrvn• 2 years ago

TLDR; the metrics that we are missing as an industry are:

- how much computing power is needed to present a single useful bit of information to the user;

- how much computing power is needed to process a single useful bit of information;

- how much total data transfer is needed to transfer a single useful bit of information.

of course to answer the above questions you need to give the definition to the term "useful single bit". And the hint here is: if we agree that - say - rainbow has 7 colors then the information about all 7 colors would take just 3 bits of data, wouldn't it?..

long story below:

this questions pops up at least twice every year by someone completely frustrated by the current state of things in the computer industry. And if you think it is limited to only software side of things, then well... ignorance is bliss.

Think of it from the incentives and rationale perspective.

Whenever you encounter a bloated piece of software or an over-engineered hardware box put yourself into the shoes of the author of this. Once you delve into the details of why and how was any specific tool or technology created you can understand why it looks so bad.

Some notorious examples of most hated programming languages were created in a very short period of time without any strategic thinking involved by people who had not had any experience with designing programming languages.

And people continue with this pattern in all types of software driven by business requirements rather than their engineering and scientific aspirations and talent (or lack thereof) most of the time.

In other words, bloated software is the result of time limitations imposed on developers. Efficiency, size, quality, stability and security go out of the window when you need to pursue other, more "important" goals.

"We need to go ahead of the competition and the time to market is our priority. We'll cut corners and burn cash. No thorough think through, just do it."

Another perspective is resource limitation. You as a developer have access to virtually unlimited computing, networking and storage resources. Remember this "memory is cheaper than developer's time" mantra?

Now put yourself in the shoes of a NES game developer. You need to squeeze in the whole universe into 32kb, with graphics, music and gameplay that will look attractive and responsive running on a 1.8MHz single-core 8-bit CPU.

Or put yourself into the shoes of the Voyager 1/2 team whose objectives are to keep a small piece of metal afloat in hostile environment for the next 50 years. With remote debugging capabilities, over-the-air software updates and continuous telemetry transmission back to Earth.

If Brendan Eich had not been given just 10 days to draft the javascript specs would we see something different in the frontend world today? Or we'd still see the 10MB garbage being downloaded by every other website just for the sake of keeping the cables busy?

And here is one of my favorite quotes by Alan Kay:

"Think about it. HTML and the Internet has gone back to the dark ages because it presupposes that there should be a browser that should understand its formats. This has to be one of the worst ideas since ms-dos, this is really a shame. it's maybe what happens when physicists decide to play with computers."

troyvit• 2 years ago

Seems like a post on Medium is a little bit overkill when the answer is simply "Absolutely. Yes. No question. How could you think otherwise?" Is there some sort of micro-twitter they could've used instead?

zrn900• 2 years ago

Yes: Endless amounts of investments and inflated stock prices enabled by the zero-interest economy caused the cash-awash tech organizations to become more like research institutions, churning out interesting, promising, but esoteric and complicated concepts and software that has scarce applications in the real world and business. They became a cross between actual companies that do business and extensions of grad schools. Like a continuation of the college that you went to. And some companies openly pursued that mix and advertised themselves as such to attract talent even.

Now that the zero-interest economy is over, the entire tech sector is readjusting.

fennecbutt• 2 years ago

I don't mind many things being written in higher level languages and being less efficient, makes turnaround time cheaper.

But what are companies doing with this fast turnaround time? Features suck and are largely incomplete in modern software. For example: Sonos speakers, if the WiFi goes down they don't reconnect. Why? Why is basically every device and every bit of software chock full of obvious stuff like that? Do we really need AI or something to tell us how to build something properly?

ags1905• 2 years ago

IMO the author of this article is right about what he is saying. And I am glad I am not the only one who sees the increased inefficiency of software and thus computers. Different times have different fashions and programming is also very influenced by fashion. But it seems like Free Pascal survived and Lazarus and fpc seem like a sane alternative, worth taking a look at.

matricaria• 2 years ago

A 30 MB doc file is a problem per se.

Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

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