Fast Software, the Best Software (2019)

https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/

by ustad • 18 days ago

152 78 18 days ago

craigmod.com

fmajid2• 18 days ago

No, no software is the best software.

BTW, the title should say "(2019)".

embedding-shape• 18 days ago

Best solution is no software, or as little code as possible. But that the best software is no software isn't very practical or actionable :)

fmajid2• 17 days ago

Example: I only buy basic Logitech B110s wired mice. No vendor software needed to activate mostly useless extra functionality, compatible with every single OS, including OpenBSD which doesn't support Bluetooth. In this case, no (driver) software is the best software.

thunderbong• 18 days ago

No code is faster than no code

sfn42• 18 days ago

Faster at doing nothing?

kazinator3• 17 days ago

But that's an example of fast software: how many nanoseconds does it take to run zero instructions?

FrankRay78• 18 days ago

Slop or not, I enjoyed reading it. And could relate.

HelloUsername• 18 days ago

Previous discussion in 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20517144

rossant• 18 days ago

I fully agree. I loathe slow software. I hate bloat. I love fast software. As a developer, I'm completely, even irrationally, obsessed with speed, performance optimization, and profiling. I wish more developers felt the same way.

jonhohle• 18 days ago

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

sota_pop• 17 days ago

We understand more than you’ll never know.

coldblues• 17 days ago

Irrational how? What higher values does it undermine for you to make fast software?

didgetmaster• 17 days ago

OP is probably referring to many engineering managers who think it is irrational to spend an hour in order to speed up a computing task that only shaves a few milliseconds off.

Even when that software is widely used so the few milliseconds add up to thousands of hours in collective time savings. 'We don't pay for user's time, only your's', is the attitude. Again 'irrational'.

Sesse__• 17 days ago

The sad part is that most employers don't care particularly about performance optimization skills (the economics don't work out, they can often just fix the problem cheaper with more hardware—and even if they can't, they mostly don't bear the cost themselves).

The fun part is that when your employer _does_ care about software optimization, few people are actually good at it and your skills are more exclusive :-)

jimbokun3• 17 days ago

This is true until they see the AWS bill after moving all their infrastructure there in a difficult to undo manner.

Suddenly they are very aware of the costs of inefficient software.

Ygg2• 18 days ago

Honestly, I'm in partially disagree camp. What matters is how much time it saves.

A good WYSIWYG editor will run circles around the fastest text editor. Even if WYSIWYG is a bit slower to open.

It would be preferable for software to be more focused and faster over time, but that doesn't attract people to it.

jdw64• 18 days ago

Fast and efficient software varies depending on the local context, but for me, I think I'd be fine with something slower as long as it's convenient enough. After all, once it passes a certain threshold, I can barely even notice the speed difference anyway.

I wonder what OP's thinks of IDEs like VSCode. Would they see it as heavy and not great because it's Electron-based? But I find IDEs convenient.

jimbokun3• 17 days ago

Didn’t ask me but I’ve been enjoying Zed and finding it a big improvement over using VS Code.

ungreased0675• 18 days ago

I run headless Alpine Linux (a minimal distro) in my homelab and it’s fast AF. The lag in Windows Explorer is sad when something like cd folder/folder is instant in Linux.

prodigalknight• 18 days ago

To be fair, cd folder/folder is also instant in a command line in Windows, it's just the GUI aspects that are slow. Comparing Windows Explorer to a terminal is comparing apples to oranges.

bayindirh2• 17 days ago

I don't think so. Windows is a GUI first OS, and Linux is a CLI first (or even CLI native) OS. You can't open a command line window in Windows without loading more than half of the desktop stack.

In that sense, when a terminal (running on a desktop environment) in Linux is faster than Windows Explorer, it's a shame. When a big file explorer like Dolphin drives circles around native file explorer of Windows, that's a big ole embarrassment.

sgarland• 18 days ago

I don’t think I’ve ever noticed a difference in speed on the terminal between distros. Shells (or more accurately, plugins / frameworks - I recently gave up oh-my-zsh in favor of zimfw for that reason), yes, but not the terminal itself.

marginalia_nu2• 18 days ago

I really don't understand how you can even create software that feels as bad to use as Windows Explorer. It's like it's barely attached to reality. There's this weird floaty delay in everything. You copy a file, or did you? You're not sure. It hasn't updated yet. Oh, now the copy dialog appears with this progress bar that isn't showing progress. The dialog just sits there. Is something happening? I don't know. Many seconds later the dialog closes. But it hasn't showed up in the window yet... oh, now it did!

How is that even possible, especially with modern hardware? Like you'd almost have to build the file explorer around like a sqlite-based message queue with a 1500ms poll interval to get performance characteristics like this. Absolutely insane feats of architecture astronautism are no doubt required for this to happen.

fuzzfactor• 17 days ago

I really don't understand how you can even create software that feels as bad to use as Windows Explorer.

I was wondering how bad a sign it was when the decline in performance between Windows 95 and Windows 98 was detectable in many ways, but nobody was complaining because it was not always noticeable on PCs that were 3 years newer. You had to figure Microsoft developers had way better PCs than that, and didn't have any clue at all.

Turns out my suspicions were correct, it was the insidiously ignored ramp-up to exponential amounts of sluggishness as time marches on.

You know, like a snail without a shell :(

gmm1990• 17 days ago

It’s probably got phone home a few times to to make sure they’re measuring user engagement

BoingBoomTschak• 17 days ago

Wild theory for fun: this is on purpose to condition people in order to seamlessly switch to OneDrive as whole data drive.

At least your description matches some the pain I get using NFS + lf.

sharts• 17 days ago

Electron?

pjmlp2• 16 days ago

The new Windows Explorer uses WinRT/WinUI, with its AddRef/Release all over the place.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/microsofts-window...

And yes, it sucks,

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/discussions/1...

pgisapedo• 18 days ago

No way I wanna chat with my oven

mike_hock• 18 days ago

Got any burning questions today?

jagged-chisel• 17 days ago

Maybe a few half-baked thoughts.

ivanjermakov• 18 days ago

Google Maps has gotten so slow

When it comes to navigating (except public transit), hiking, and route building, Organic Maps[1] is very good. OSM data and offline-first is the way forward for detailed and _fast_ map experience.

For cycling route building I have to mention BRouter[2], which allows you to write a custom cost function that is used to tweak your route preferences.

[1] https://organicmaps.app/

[2] https://brouter.de/brouter/index.html

titanomachy• 18 days ago

Cool! I'm guessing no traffic data in organic maps? I'd still install it to use as a backup.

hansvm• 17 days ago

I remember an engineer I talked to recently saying that OSM didn't have sufficiently up-to-date data for their routing use case -- new roads, closed roads, traffic data, etc. Is that the case?

rurban3• 17 days ago

No. It's their route function which sucks compared to Google maps. Their data is better and newer.

carlosjobim• 17 days ago

https://www.cycle.travel is also excellent for cycling routes. Made by a solo developer as far as I remember.

maelito• 16 days ago

Who also build Tilemaker.

wseqyrku• 18 days ago

I think it's the different feeling you get from using an end-to-end streaming service (compute, not videos) versus the one that does a lot of intermittent buffering. It's quite subtle actually. Using a vanilla language model can feel like that if it's also sufficiently small but they are going towards the opposite direction very rapidly now because cloud.

countWSS• 17 days ago

The neglected part here is latency, speed itself can be masked by progress bars/animations, but having visible lag ruins the idea of speed and users treat it as slow vs animated loading bar.

archargelod• 17 days ago

Maybe it's me who's weird, but I find animations as much worse - it's basically pointless and wastes slightly more time (even when program is fast enough!).

The interface without animations feels snappier even if sometimes it takes a second to load. I disable any and all animations in software that I can - particularly in Android (via developer settings) and Linux (i3+vim vs something like KDE+VScode).

qup• 17 days ago

As a kid I liked the interfaces that lagged badly, but still accepted input perfectly.

It felt like I was racing. Type the whole message before the screen updates? Check.

I miss AOL sometimes.

kazinator3• 17 days ago

Some tiny amount of animation is needed to show that the system has responded.

I regularly use a website in which a submit button does not change state in any way. It is indistinguishable from the click having gone to /dev/null. And the completion of the action takes a copule of seconds.

It's literally, "no response ... few seconds ... oh, done!"

If the button simply responded in the usual way, like 3d poppin in and out effect, it would be better. The UI can change state also to show some "wait ..." text.

These are examples of animations, just not progressive/persistent.

giovannibonetti• 17 days ago

Shout-out to PowerSync for making it easier to develop fast offline-first mobile apps. It pushes data from Postgres/MySQL/SQL Server subscriptions to a SQLite into the user's mobile device, avoiding the need for many loading animations when the data is there ahead of time. My company is a customer and we recommend it.

MomsAVoxell• 17 days ago

Yes, there are so many examples of this .. a recent one for me, is iStatMenu .. it just got to the point that waiting for it to start, alone, was sufficiently boring enough that I sought an alternative .. and of course, I realized, there's no reason not to use the Linux tooling I'm accustomed to, and so I have btop where iStatMenu used to live, kinda. btop doesn't get in the way, doesn't phone home, doesn't check a registration key, isn't harvesting key clicks, and .. so on .. its just small, light, and fast.

Well, with the encumbrance of it living in a terminal window, but I also live in the terminal window even on MacOS, so its a feature not a bug.

Point is, I wouldn't have this to say about it if iStatMenu had just been a little more discrete about its loading times ..

satvikpendem• 17 days ago

Stats is the open source version I use

williebeek• 17 days ago

I will read this entire article tomorrow while I wait for the Cursor UI and Visual Studio to finish loading.

jimbokun3• 17 days ago

I’m really enjoying Zed.

Definitely much more responsive than VS Code.

sylware• 17 days ago

Remove the specter and friends mitigations from your linux kernel, and your system will be significantly faster.

mwkaufma• 17 days ago

Shout-out: Voidtools Everything on windows. Lightning fast file search.

kazinator3• 17 days ago

If the software is fast as a byproduct of being simple, that tends to align with correctness.

If it is fast because it is optimized, then that does not align with correctness, because optimizing something that works only adds risk.

snek_case• 17 days ago

Simple software is also easier to optimize. The simpler it is, the less weird corner cases you have to deal with.

mikebs1• 17 days ago

In production operations this plays out concretely. The systems that hold up under incident pressure are almost always the simple ones. Clever optimizations are the first things to behave unexpectedly at 2am.

RetroTechie• 17 days ago

One could say that (for whatever reasons) many software makers do a poor job of keeping non-essential stuff out of their software. And/or do a poor job of taking the shortest route from user input -> result. Never mind UI design.

Similar thing is happening with web sites. Lately I've done "view page source" on eg. news sites I visit. Common pattern:

100s of KB html, loads & loads of meta tags, then a mountain of CSS junk, embedded scripts etc, and at the very end: maybe 3..5 paragraphs of text (a few dozen words each) with actual content. That's not counting images, video or external scripts, stylesheets, fonts etc. Oh and images not from the actual subject discussed, but 'random' sample illustration from an image library.

Ok sure, you want to add some meta-tags to html documents. You want a page to look good, and run a couple of scripts. But do you need a MB+ of that to provide a few KB of text to your visitors?

NO YOU DON'T. >95% of that is non-essential crap that shouldn't be there in the 1st place.

There's little doubt in my mind that (most) software development works the same way. Bad incentives -> crappy software.

aetherspawn• 17 days ago

Just because something doesn’t perceive to be lightweight doesn’t mean that it isn’t. Many modern web frameworks are extremely lightweight (ie Svelte), but it’s complicated how they achieve it, and the source code looks like sludge.

rurban3• 17 days ago

Also called: "Death by PM"

Esp. known from Microsoft, Adobe, Google. Should be added to the Antipatterns repo

roncesvalles• 17 days ago

On this note, (from a web dev perspective) I think we've overdone making the static build as lean as possible and pushing everything into the backend. E.g., if a 2MB dataset will make a search/select bar return results instantly instead of having to roundtrip an API, just send up the whole dataset with your initial load. After gzip it's nowhere close to 2MB anyway.

Also, I think suspense is an anti-pattern now. We've all been conditioned to groan every time we see suspense animations because it means the website must be slow. It's better to just have a little circling loader or just freeze.

esafak2• 17 days ago

What do y'all do and use for performance testing in CI, given that host speed can fluctuate?

coldtea2• 17 days ago

Why would host speed fluctuate?

esafak2• 17 days ago

Noisy neighbors.

iLemming• 17 days ago

Free and open-source software is certifiably best. Even when the proprietary alternatives have better features and are faster.

I've been using computers for decades, and have used dozens of paid products, but not a single paid option stuck with me forever, while tons of open-source tools are literally irreplaceable - and not because I'm just used to them, but specifically because they give me control to customize them just the way I need.

arikrahman• 17 days ago

RapidRAW offers a good lightroom alternative nowadays.

purple-leafy• 17 days ago

Slow software sucks and simple is good.

I’m making browser games and my core idea is that they must be fast as hell and light as hell. Such that they can run on a potato!

Unfortunately this means cutting non essential animations lol.

And testing on throttled devices (low end mobile) and respecting thermal throttling

A recent win for me for performance was:

- 8192 simultaneous entities on screen path finding, checking reward functions, making strategy decisions with zero frame drops

- sub millisecond average frame Time (more like sub 0.5ms) with 256 entities on screen (logic and rendering)

- “compressing” game replays from 100KB naive to 1KB

deterministic• 17 days ago

A typical problem with software is that development continues after the software has already reached its peak. Instead of making it better, new features and changes gradually make it worse. Eventually, enough users leave that it is no longer worth paying a team to keep working on it. And then the cycle starts again.

bryanrasmussen• 17 days ago

https://medium.com/luminasticity/on-premature-optimization-i...

wanders a bit around the premature optimization history, but later has

Nowadays almost all development is for things that are not necessary. Pretty much all modern development is for things that are entertainment....The difference between things that are necessary and entertainment is that you will wait however long it takes to do the necessary thing

in the reductive view of the article everything that is not necessary is termed entertainment.

But I have noticed this. I often drop useful things because it just isn't worth it to wait. So the argument really is, in today's world, speed is almost always the most important factor anything accessed through the computer can have.

winrid• 17 days ago

Pretty proud that after six years fastcomments is still only about 30kb

I should probably work again on getting that down some :)

zombot• 17 days ago

The best software is correct and safe software. Rating "fast" more important than that is what started all this "worse is better" mess in the first place. Just not enshittifying and not using Electron should be fast enough if you don't write dumb code.

Self-Perfection• 16 days ago

I am mulling the idea that we need a day of fast software software to spread the [culture?] of loving fast low-latency software.

Like a programmers day or sysadmin day.

That is a special celebration of fast software. To celebrate one should find faster alternative to some of his usual tools, try to switch and spread the word. Or maybe avoid opening Jira for a day at $job.

Fast Software, the Best Software (2019)

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