Living in the distant future, we have remarkable technology. More Memory, Storage, and Processing power than we could ever need, want, or imagine. We even have the graphics chips integrated directly onto the CPU with specs unfathomable 25 years ago.
And despite all this, the software has gotten slower. There are delays when clicking/opening different windows, panels, and interfaces.
I've had junk computers running Windows 98 and XP that ran snappier than modern systems. What a joke.
One aspect not often considered is how so much modern software is written within frameworks within frameworks. Nobody strictly writes their own code any more. It's all imported libraries. On the web its CDNs with web frameworks.
This translates to very slow programs that must interact through layer upon layer of abstraction, where the people who wrote it couldn't even tell you most of what's going on. If software where written in such a way for a vintage Pentium 4 device, it would also run slow as shit.
There is also the shift to interpreted languages. Again, the web leads in this. And I understand that interpreted languages enable more rapid development, but the end result is unavoidably less efficient.
So today we have such things as "desktop apps" which are actually just electron applications (pre-packaged websites) running shit interpreted code within a Matryoshka doll of nested frameworks reaching out over the internet for half or more of its functionality, running on CPUs whose dies are some double-digit percentage of die space dedicated to doing something other than executing instructions originating from userspace programs.
RollinDaGrassTyson 3 points 1 day ago
One aspect not often considered is how so much modern software is written within frameworks within frameworks. Nobody strictly writes their own code any more. It's all imported libraries. On the web its CDNs with web frameworks.
This translates to very slow programs that must interact through layer upon layer of abstraction, where the people who wrote it couldn't even tell you most of what's going on. If software where written in such a way for a vintage Pentium 4 device, it would also run slow as shit.
There is also the shift to interpreted languages. Again, the web leads in this. And I understand that interpreted languages enable more rapid development, but the end result is unavoidably less efficient.
So today we have such things as "desktop apps" which are actually just electron applications (pre-packaged websites) running shit interpreted code within a Matryoshka doll of nested frameworks reaching out over the internet for half or more of its functionality, running on CPUs whose dies are some double-digit percentage of die space dedicated to doing something other than executing instructions originating from userspace programs.