The point stands anyway. Why are all my dev tools super slow? If my time is important, shouldn’t those be fast and heavily optimized? And don’t try to tell me that 4 billion cycles a second across 16 cores operating on in-memory contiguous values isn’t enough to update a watch window more than 1 time per second.

If my tools are faster than me, there’s no point in making them even faster. In fact, I’d trade some of that speed for a smaller memory footprint.

In your example of the watch window, updating it at more than 30 fps is probably overkill.

One very common mistake is optimising the wrong thing. My advice is always the same: first run a profiler with a real workload (absent that, eu it over your automated tests), then look at what you need to optimise for speed. All the rest should be optimised for readability.

In the article’s case, if counting warriors is so important, keeping a counter at the AntColony class that’s updated every time you write to an Ant would be the obvious solution.

> Why are all my dev tools super slow? If my time is important,

Quantify important into how much you spend on your tooling.

Aside from some key bits of development software at the IC / board layout, almost everything a software developer needs is free, open source or cheap. Noone pays $1000 for an IDE anymore.

> Noone pays $1000 for an IDE anymore.

How many minutes per developer per day before that level of expenditure pays for itself inside 2-3 months?

Who cares? The premise is false, you can't buy it. There is no "fast tools" you pay for. Every decent shop got their devs an SSD at the first available opportunity because it paid for itself really quickly, cost you money _not_ to buy them. The very definition of a false economy was "no the devs aren't getting new shiny sportsmode SSDs for their boxes."

We all use gcc and clang (for relevant languages), for example because everything else you might pay for sucks a lot harder. Whatever the ideology you claim or deny. Intel literally damaged their customers' products to try to make themselves look better than AMD with theirs! They're a non-starter after showing themselves willing to do that but if you must, yes, their compilers still suck exclusively on intel more than gcc. How is microsoft's compilers standards chasing going? In the 21st century yet or /still/ not? (Oh come one, we're mostly there but for ... yeah). Compiling template heavy C++? Does developer time matter?

(But just quietly, terminals & cmdline tools feel a lot more productive than IDEs to me and I use both in differing circumstances).

I don't have a hard math here. But here's some example: JRebel. It allows for instant class reloading in JVM. It increases one's productivity tremendously. And it's expensive as hell. They used to have free version, they don't have it anymore. I can only judge that they're struggling and forced to squeeze all they can, because developers will prefer free restricted version over paid full-featured version. I know, I do, I don't value my own time and I'll never pay more than $100/year for a tool (and hopefully much less), I already trying hard to justify Idea subscription, because it seems that Idea CE contains almost everything I need.

If developers would love to spend thousands of bucks here and there, paid developer tools industry would flourish. But I think that it's even degraded compared to the past. I remember paid Delphi IDE and I remember paid components and that was a thing back then. I can't remember any popular paid React component right now, despite the fact that much more people are using React compared to Delphi.