https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/

Let's kill the bloat!!

Software disenchantment
=============================
I’ve been programming for 15 years now. Recently, our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and IT in general.
.....
Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems to be ok with it. People are often even proud about how inefficient it is, as in “why should we worry, computers are fast enough”:
...
Look around: our portable computers are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that brought man to the moon. Yet every other webpage struggles to maintain a smooth 60fps scroll on the latest top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. I can comfortably play games, watch 4K videos, but not scroll web pages? How is that ok?
...
Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update a tiny rectangular region and modern text editors can’t do that in 16ms. It’s a lot of time. A LOT. A 3D game can fill the whole screen with hundreds of thousands (!!!) of polygons in the same 16ms and also process input, recalculate the world and dynamically load/unload resources. How come?

On Sunday, 12 January 2020 at 20:29:59 UTC, aberba wrote:
> https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/


Wow, this person is really uninformed. They know just enough about something to make a naive comment but not enough to understand *why* it is the way it is.

> An Android system with no apps takes up almost 6 GB. Just think for a second about how obscenely HUGE that number is. What’s in there, HD movies? I guess it’s basically code: kernel, drivers. Some string and resources too, sure, but those can’t be big. So, how many drivers do you need for a phone?

The onboard memory on an android device is generally hardwired into the system. That means the system/vendor/boot/dtbo/vbmeta/etc... partitions are going to be a set size. So even if my system image is 1.4 GB and vendor image is 500 mb. It'll still take up 6 GB if that's what was allocated to that partition. The device I'm working on currently has about 4 GB for the system partition and 1 GB for the vendor partition.

So about 1.4 GB for system image, the largest  folders are for apps. The largest app is Webview totaling 108 MB (in app/). So just the webview alone can take half the space of the rest of the public apps. This is meant to be a minimal android build, so I wouldn't doubt a lot of that space does end up being taken up by pre-installed apps, and extra space for future updates.

12K	addon.d
225M	app
27M	bin
4.0K	build.prop
104K	compatibility_matrix.xml
5.9M	etc
20K	fake-libs
16K	fake-libs64
69M	fonts
217M	framework
149M	lib
222M	lib64
21M	media
233M	priv-app
8.0K	product
27M	usr
0	vendor
13M	xbin

> Windows 95 was 30MB. Today we have web pages heavier than that! Windows 10 is 4GB, which is 133 times as big. But is it 133 times as superior? I mean, functionally they are basically the same. Yes, we have Cortana, but I doubt it takes 3970 MB. But whatever Windows 10 is, is Android really 150% of that?

Not sure why he thinks things taking up more spaces means they have to be better somehow? Developers have limited time, I'm sure they could squeeze out 500+ MB or something, but how much developer time would that take? Is it worth wasting the time to minimize it that much when people have 4 TB hdds? When they can download a 4 GB file in < 2 mins.

That's what he isn't getting. Doing these things isn't free. It takes development time to do all these things, development time that thanks to the hardware we have today, allows for it to be spent else where. Where it is more valuable. I remember using Windows 95, it's garbage in comparison to Windows 10. Comparing an OS based solely on it's file size, is just something someone incompetent would do.

> Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update a tiny rectangular region and modern text editors can’t do that in 16ms. It’s a lot of time. A LOT. A 3D game can fill the whole screen with hundreds of thousands (!!!) of polygons in the same 16ms and also process input, recalculate the world and dynamically load/unload resources. How come?

I'll just assume he's talking about electron based editors here. They are built ontop of a web browser so yah they are going to be a bit more resource hungry. But if you take VS Code as an example. It is extremely easy to customize. There's no dozens of forks of it that modify little things to get certain features. There's more quality extensions for VS Code that integrate flawless, that aren't hacks than there are for Emacs, even though VS Code hasn't existed for nearly as long. There's a trade off for the ease of development and customizability. The latency also isn't that bad, it is pretty bad in Atom but that just shows the difference between the two.

Then he compares that to games and GPU rendering, just ugh. Maybe he didn't know it runs in a web browser, but he also goes on a rant about how web browsers don't render fast enough for him. Web browsers need to be secure, achieving performance a long side that is difficult. He seems to be in the mind set that security doesn't matter, or at the very least he probably doesn't think about it, as it seems to be more often than it should be. There's a reason why there's only so many web browsers. Hell even Microsoft gave up and uses Chromium's backend. Think about that, Microsoft, with a B.

Then the whole, oh we went to the moon with these slow computers. Yah going to the moon is pretty easy in comparison to some computer problems. As someone put, when a politician tried to make the same argument about going to the moon, it'd be akin to walking on the surface of the sun.

I could go on, this article is way too long and it's filled with misconceptions, terribly awful comparisons, and just so much more.

On Sunday, 12 January 2020 at 22:59:22 UTC, Arine wrote:
> On Sunday, 12 January 2020 at 20:29:59 UTC, aberba wrote:
>> https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/
>
>
> Wow, this person is really uninformed. They know just enough about something to make a naive comment but not enough to understand *why* it is the way it is.
>
>> An Android system with no apps takes up almost 6 GB. Just think for a second about how obscenely HUGE that number is. What’s in there, HD movies? I guess it’s basically code: kernel, drivers. Some string and resources too, sure, but those can’t be big. So, how many drivers do you need for a phone?
>
> The onboard memory on an android device is generally hardwired into the system. That means the system/vendor/boot/dtbo/vbmeta/etc... partitions are going to be a set size. So even if my system image is 1.4 GB and vendor image is 500 mb. It'll still take up 6 GB if that's what was allocated to that partition. The device I'm working on currently has about 4 GB for the system partition and 1 GB for the vendor partition.
>
> So about 1.4 GB for system image, the largest  folders are for apps. The largest app is Webview totaling 108 MB (in app/). So just the webview alone can take half the space of the rest of the public apps. This is meant to be a minimal android build, so I wouldn't doubt a lot of that space does end up being taken up by pre-installed apps, and extra space for future updates.
>
> 12K	addon.d
> 225M	app
> 27M	bin
> 4.0K	build.prop
> 104K	compatibility_matrix.xml
> 5.9M	etc
> 20K	fake-libs
> 16K	fake-libs64
> 69M	fonts
> 217M	framework
> 149M	lib
> 222M	lib64
> 21M	media
> 233M	priv-app
> 8.0K	product
> 27M	usr
> 0	vendor
> 13M	xbin
>
>> Windows 95 was 30MB. Today we have web pages heavier than that! Windows 10 is 4GB, which is 133 times as big. But is it 133 times as superior? I mean, functionally they are basically the same. Yes, we have Cortana, but I doubt it takes 3970 MB. But whatever Windows 10 is, is Android really 150% of that?
>
> Not sure why he thinks things taking up more spaces means they have to be better somehow? Developers have limited time, I'm sure they could squeeze out 500+ MB or something, but how much developer time would that take? Is it worth wasting the time to minimize it that much when people have 4 TB hdds? When they can download a 4 GB file in < 2 mins.
>
> That's what he isn't getting. Doing these things isn't free. It takes development time to do all these things, development time that thanks to the hardware we have today, allows for it to be spent else where. Where it is more valuable. I remember using Windows 95, it's garbage in comparison to Windows 10. Comparing an OS based solely on it's file size, is just something someone incompetent would do.
>
>> Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update a tiny rectangular region and modern text editors can’t do that in 16ms. It’s a lot of time. A LOT. A 3D game can fill the whole screen with hundreds of thousands (!!!) of polygons in the same 16ms and also process input, recalculate the world and dynamically load/unload resources. How come?
>
> I'll just assume he's talking about electron based editors here. They are built ontop of a web browser so yah they are going to be a bit more resource hungry. But if you take VS Code as an example. It is extremely easy to customize. There's no dozens of forks of it that modify little things to get certain features. There's more quality extensions for VS Code that integrate flawless, that aren't hacks than there are for Emacs, even though VS Code hasn't existed for nearly as long. There's a trade off for the ease of development and customizability. The latency also isn't that bad, it is pretty bad in Atom but that just shows the difference between the two.
>
> Then he compares that to games and GPU rendering, just ugh. Maybe he didn't know it runs in a web browser, but he also goes on a rant about how web browsers don't render fast enough for him. Web browsers need to be secure, achieving performance a long side that is difficult. He seems to be in the mind set that security doesn't matter, or at the very least he probably doesn't think about it, as it seems to be more often than it should be. There's a reason why there's only so many web browsers. Hell even Microsoft gave up and uses Chromium's backend. Think about that, Microsoft, with a B.
>
> Then the whole, oh we went to the moon with these slow computers. Yah going to the moon is pretty easy in comparison to some computer problems. As someone put, when a politician tried to make the same argument about going to the moon, it'd be akin to walking on the surface of the sun.
>
> I could go on, this article is way too long and it's filled with misconceptions, terribly awful comparisons, and just so much more.

Nah, the author of the article is right. The web and its techs (js) are completely retarded. I've myself observed on top of the usual slowness, a regression, on several major sites, during the latest months.

About the part on keyboard latency. This is based on another blog post I've read a few years ago. (https://hexus.net/tech/news/peripherals/113648-modern-computer-complexity-heavy-impact-keyboard-latency/) and other stuff too.

The problem might be that you're so much into the web services that you don't even realize anymore how softs made in the classic way were much faster. But those softs failed to adapt to the web so developers have started to look elsewhere for a better interaction with the web.

At some point in the late 2000's compiled languages have lost. The article posted by the OP is fundamentally about that, if you read between the lines.

On Sunday, 12 January 2020 at 20:29:59 UTC, aberba wrote:
> https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/
>
> Let's kill the bloat!!
>
> Software disenchantment
> =============================
> I’ve been programming for 15 years now. Recently, our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and IT in general.
> ...
> “why should we worry, computers are fast enough”:
> ...
> Look around: our portable computers are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that brought man to the moon.
> ...
> Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs.


This has bugged me for a while, too. Behind you all the way, Aberba.

On Monday, 13 January 2020 at 11:54:19 UTC, user5678 wrote:
> About the part on keyboard latency. This is based on another blog post I've read a few years ago. (https://hexus.net/tech/news/peripherals/113648-modern-computer-complexity-heavy-impact-keyboard-latency/) and other stuff too.

He wasn't talking about general latency such as that. Otherwise games would have the same problem, and he was specifically talking about editors.

> The article posted by the OP is fundamentally about that, if you read between the lines.

You're just taking your own meaning from the article. If you have to "read between the lines", you aren't reading what the author actually wrote.

On Monday, 13 January 2020 at 11:54:19 UTC, user5678 wrote:
> (https://hexus.net/tech/news/peripherals/113648-modern-computer-complexity-heavy-impact-keyboard-latency/) and other stuff too.

He's comparing two different technologies. If you want low input lag, get a TN panel gaming monitor with a high refresh rate. The thing is those cost $$$. All the while most of the devices he's testing are laptops. I'd love to a see a CRT display in a laptop. Read between the lines, that the author doesn't know what their doing.

On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 05:40:08PM +0000, Arine via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Monday, 13 January 2020 at 11:54:19 UTC, user5678 wrote:
> > (https://hexus.net/tech/news/peripherals/113648-modern-computer-complexity-heavy-impact-keyboard-latency/) and other stuff too.
> 
> He's comparing two different technologies. If you want low input lag, get a TN panel gaming monitor with a high refresh rate. The thing is those cost $$$. All the while most of the devices he's testing are laptops. I'd love to a see a CRT display in a laptop. Read between the lines, that the author doesn't know what their doing.

You're totally missing the point.  The point is to take a step back at the current state of things and evaluate just how much it (doesn't) make sense:

1) Back in the 70's, we had 16 kHz CPUs and only up to 64KB of RAM.

2) Today we're in 2020, with multi-core CPUs running at speeds measured in GHz, and RAM measured in GBs.

3) A word processor in the 70's runs horribly slowly with horrible lag between input keystrokes.

4) Technologically speaking, today we have enough processing power to run AAA games that process hundreds of thousands of objects per frame running at 60 fps.  We're talking about things like *real-time raytracing* here, something completely unimaginable in the 70's.

5) Yet a browser app of today, built with said modern technology with modern processing power, still runs just as horribly slowly as a word processor from the 70's running on ancient ultra-slow hardware, with just as horrible a lag between input keystrokes.

Something isn't adding up.

Yes, all of this can be explained, and if you lose sight of the forest for the trees, every step in the history of how this came about can be logically explained. But when you step back and look at the forest as a whole, the whole situation looks completely ridiculous.  The necessary tech is all there to make things FAR more efficient. The development methodologies are all there, and we have orders of magnitude more manpower than in the 70's.  What a word processor has to compute is peanuts compared to an AAA game with real-time raytracing running at 60 fps. Yet here we are, stuck with a completely insane web design philosophy building horribly slow and unreliable apps that are barely a step above an ancient word processor from the 70's.

The browser king wears no clothes, yet its proponents see invisible.


T

-- 
An elephant: A mouse built to government specifications. -- Robert Heinlein

On Monday, 13 January 2020 at 11:54:19 UTC, user5678 wrote:
> On Sunday, 12 January 2020 at 22:59:22 UTC, Arine wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Nah, the author of the article is right. The web and its techs (js) are completely retarded. I've myself observed on top of the usual slowness, a regression, on several major sites, during the latest months.
>
> [...]

So instead of having your own system interacting with the web the situation is that the web tries to interact with your system, which is a completely crazy situation.

On Monday, 13 January 2020 at 17:20:05 UTC, Arine wrote:
> On Monday, 13 January 2020 at 11:54:19 UTC, user5678 wrote:
>> About the part on keyboard latency. This is based on another blog post I've read a few years ago. (https://hexus.net/tech/news/peripherals/113648-modern-computer-complexity-heavy-impact-keyboard-latency/) and other stuff too.
>
> He wasn't talking about general latency such as that. Otherwise games would have the same problem, and he was specifically talking about editors.
>
>> The article posted by the OP is fundamentally about that, if you read between the lines.
>
> You're just taking your own meaning from the article. If you have to "read between the lines", you aren't reading what the author actually wrote.

everything is slow because OS like windows, who deprecate their native UI
and prefer bloated apps that have to pass in a validation process making
their own techs (i.e C#) more preferable.

But their OS, so supposedly made with their "fantastic tech", has to be patched every month, using an remarkably slow process that will monopolize your network.

At the same time everybody thinks that VScode is great.
There's a name for that

DIGITAL WASHING

I agree with the first comment.