Discussion summary
Discussions in 2019 touched on software quality, speed, and development practices. Some emphasized correctness and safety over speed, while others discussed performance testing and Linux optimizations.
What the discussion says
- Speed isn't always the priority; correctness and safety matter more.
- Rapid development can degrade software quality over time.
- Performance testing can be affected by host system fluctuations.
- Removing certain Linux mitigations can improve speed.
“Rating 'fast' more important than correctness is what started all this 'worse is better' mess.”
“A typical problem is that development continues after reaching its peak, often making software worse.”
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- Hacker News
- 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
by purple-leafy - 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.
- 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.
by iLemming - 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.
- 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.by countWSS
- 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.
by roncesvalles - > 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.
by ivanjermakov - 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 ..
by MomsAVoxell