Re:Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night
by digi_owl on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @01:12PM
(#17869907)
Never mind that Win95 didn't need a GPU that could push millions of polygons just to draw its UI...
Re:Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night
by shawnz on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @08:27AM
(#17867672)
What layers of abstraction are we stacking? Sure, there's electron/v8, but that's just one layer. You said yourself that notepad in an electron-based x86 VM is still pretty small, so clearly electron itself isnt the problem.
Maybe people just demand more from their software these days, and all these little conveniences just add up more than you'd realize? That would also explain why the system is not "doomed in the eyes of many" as you claim it ought to be.
Re:Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night
by rayiner on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @10:25AM
(#17868415)
What conveniences? Most web apps (e.g. Google Docs) have less functionality than their Win95 counterparts, notwithstanding the stupendous amounts of added bloat.
Re:Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night
by belark on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @09:29AM
(#17868044)
A lot of the conveniences of the modern computing landscape are anything but.
Laggy response times in aforementioned text editors, frivolous UI animations on certain OSs, terrible web apps like JIRA...
The complexity doesn't necessarily mean better software. It's quite often worse along many dimensions: performance, usability, maintainability, portability.
Windows 95 had most of the things we use in a GUI environment today and it ran on a 486 with 8MB of ram. When packaged in Electron with a javascript x86 emulator it is still smaller than many modern text editors. Plenty of GUIs ran on significantly less.
Since the modern web is basically one of the worlds most overengineered and crufty VM platforms, I don't expect it would run very well, and that would probably be enough to doom the system in the eyes of many, sadly.