Re:Another Step Toward the End of Moore’s Law
by gameswithgo on Friday May 31, 2019 @02:14PM
(#20063493)
There are some minor and major things wrong with this attitude:
1. it wastes energy, increasingly a non trivial share of total energy use by humans
2. it often manifests itself as the user (me) having to wait for things that should be instant.
If the latter never happened, I would be mostly on board with what you are saying. I strongly wish we could improve the state of software such that you could achieve the same productivity we have now, with only a factor of 2 to 10 slowdown vs optimum instead of the 10x to 1000x we accept now. I think that should be possible. As a start, we can make first class jits for languages that are usually interpreted( python / ruby ) and possible, come up with statically typed languages that people find as nice to use as they find dynamically typed ones. I think this should be possible with techniques like type inference. Doing those two things can improve the efficiency of a lot of code without any downsides imho.
1. it wastes energy, increasingly a non trivial share of total energy use by humans
2. it often manifests itself as the user (me) having to wait for things that should be instant.
If the latter never happened, I would be mostly on board with what you are saying. I strongly wish we could improve the state of software such that you could achieve the same productivity we have now, with only a factor of 2 to 10 slowdown vs optimum instead of the 10x to 1000x we accept now. I think that should be possible. As a start, we can make first class jits for languages that are usually interpreted( python / ruby ) and possible, come up with statically typed languages that people find as nice to use as they find dynamically typed ones. I think this should be possible with techniques like type inference. Doing those two things can improve the efficiency of a lot of code without any downsides imho.