Modern software usually doesn't run at incredible speeds on an nvme drive with top of the line hardware. Modern software is often just slow. What can I do on a modern operating system today that I couldn't do on a predecessor released 20 years ago? What justifies that Windows 10 feels slower to use then Windows XP while Windows 10 runs on hardware that is tens of thousands of times faster?
Under this lens, what really defines modern software is slowness. Take away the advantage of orders of magnitude of hardware improvements and you would be left with something unusably slow.
Nowadays I have a NAS that stores both the raw media and installation scripts for those games, and I have wine/dosbox/mame/mess startup scripts for many of them. Can't say that my inner child is disappointed about that, but building and curating that system took a lot more effort than I'd like to admit.
I don't buy games that require online activation, because I can't store and play them the same way. My inner child is very disappointed about that.
None of the figures shown in the article have any relevance if one has a slight knowledge of their operating system and are not running on decades old technology.
Even your example of 2 whole seconds seems wayyy too slow to me. I don't even tolerate that sort of delay when working on my 10+ year old commodity hardware --- I've already tweaked my tools to be totally instantaneous so I can continue typing as soon as I release the short-cut key.
Even if you don't go so far back as to require swapping disks, dist-upgrading a desktop Ubuntu or Debian system still took several hours ~10 years ago. Booting the system (again Linux, because that's what I had) took at least a minute, probably more. My laptop that's not bleeding edge by any standard is not booting instantly to the desktop, but it's definitely faster than that.
It is in some sense eye-opening to think that pure desktop latency might not have improved over the years. It makes you wonder if things could be much faster still, and being limited to old enough hardware might also change one's perspective. But to me, having a reasonably snappy desktop experience on a laptop from ~7 years ago without having to resort to lightweight desktop environments or older software is something that would have been outlandish for most of the history of PCs.
What the heck does it matter if 5400 RPM disks are old technology or not?? Do you have any actual reason that your program runs slowly on such hardware?
It's very arrogant to assume that since you can afford to upgrade to the latest technologies, then everyone who can't should be left behind. There are probably billions of people using spinning rust in their machines. If your software does not run with acceptable performance then that's a problem with your software, not their hardware.
The issue is that the speed -characteristics- are so very different between HDDs and SSDs. Not just the raw speed. Decent performance of anything with IO on an HDD requires that the IO is specifically structured to minimize seeks and maximize sequential access. That takes time and skill. If very few modern machines don’t have an SSD then it is understandable to simply skip this difficulty. That time and effort is often better spent elsewhere, and this is a valid tradeoff to make.
It sounds like it's justifying planned obsolescence.
My desktop products are made in Delphi (compiles to native code) and are very responsive and frugal on resources. Run fine on very old hardware. Desktop products done in C++ would be even better but I am not masochistic enough to develop GUI in C++. At least for now.
I do use VS code as for some tasks there is no viable alternative for me and since my development workstation is a monster it runs fine. My own desktop apps however are native and I test them on really shitty hardware where one would not dream of running VS Code / Slack / whatever.
For fun I've compiled my main desktop product to 32 bit and it runs on a friggin old netbook just fine. Also from my point of view speed of development is not any slower when developing native applications. So unless client specifically requires it or I am doing some front end in browser my desktop apps are all native and coded in Delphi/Lazarus and my backends are C++.
The only time i saw a difference when i made a raytracer benchmark[0] explicitly to benchmark the codegen where the Free Pascal codegen at its best was at 177% of the speed of the Clang 8 at its best. In my experience this is not a realistic metric though (according to the benchmark my C 3D engine should be five times slower if compiled in BC++ than Clang but in practice since it does a variety more stuff than just a single thing the performance difference is barely perceptible).
Should I be surprised that my turn of the millennium PC can't even run Slack? Yes, in absolute terms it's a bit ridiculous, but we're not talking philosophy here, Moore's law is a thing and software has been getting more complex as hardware got faster. Deal with it.
How is this news?
Uhh, care to share? Asking for a friend....
People are expected to run modern software for reasons of security, to retain interoperability with the latest standards, or to reduce support costs for the vendor. It is not very surprising that people don't want to upgrade their hardware for reasons that are outside of their control.
If you quote Moore's law, let me quote Wirth's law:
As a C & C++ dev that has always cared that my software works on machines and networks that are a fraction of what I use for testing, I get so tired of careless programs that have clearly been designed for the latest beefiest machines that the devs had at that time.
Same for the web. It should be mandatory by Law to verify websites with the baseline of a 2G connection. (just... half kidding)
...Yes? What is it doing that wouldn't fit in those constraints?
It is not my place to justify why modern software is so inefficient, pointing the finger to Windows 10 in particular as if it's an outlier.
Why are YOU using inefficient languages, heavyweight virtual machines, GB sized binaries, Electron and Javascript to write your applications? Why is your boss asking to add feature upon feature upon feature? There is a reason we're in this place, but until then, my point is, stop complaining everything is slow on your old PC. You know exactly why that is, and it is your fault as much as mine.
It's because of us, software engineers, that everything is slow, so it is completely hypocritical that on HN of all places one has to explain that sadly to run modern software one needs modern hardware.
We've put ourselves in this situation and now there's a lot of surprised Pikachu faces around, complaining about Windows getting slower and alt-tabbing to their day job writing yet another crappy Javascript abstraction layer on their shiny M1 MBP.
C++ still does need more resources to compile programs than AAA games and keep running for 20min / 1h / 2h / 4h?
What were they teaching those compilers engineers and language designers back in the day? nothing about writing performant code, performance tests, regressions and yada yada?
C++'s main speed issue is of course that it's the most text-based language ever and many entire libraries are implemented as headers due to the fragile base class issue.
I don't care on software "engineers" if you are a bunch of engineer wannabes where in my country in order to be an enginner you should be able to write your own OS from scratch and learn lots of linear algebra.
That argument would be more convincing if Microsoft hadn't systematically pushed the owners of older PCs to update them to run Windows 10. How many millions of PCs dating from the early to mid 2010s are now stuck with the results despite their hardware still working normally?
The trouble with 7 in that situation is that either 8.1 or 10 needed to be the next good version, but they weren't. Do you know anyone who actually wants their system to change its UI every six months? Or to install updates whether they agree with them or not, even though those updates can have serious consequences if they go wrong and cause inconvenience even if they work? Or who likes having their own computer phoning home without their consent? Or having ads inserted into their daily user experience?
If Microsoft was producing an operating system people actually wanted, they wouldn't need to push dodgy updates to get people to use it.
> Run old technology with old software. It is ridiculous that consumer hardware is still being sold with crappy 5400 RPM disks in 2021.
You pretty much answered your own question. Whether you like it or not, people are still using hard drives because hard drives are still being sold. Just because those people prioritize capacity over performance, for a given price point, doesn't mean they want performance to be ignored altogether.
As I mentioned down thread, you can get 1TB Samsung SSDs right now for $80. Not the best one, still faster than a hard disk. NVMe are a little more expensive than that, and even faster. The price is not really a valid excuse.
Yes, my 2TB NVMe is $300, and does sequential read/writes of 3,000 MB/s, which is close to 100x faster than an HDD. It's not space age technology, solid state storage has been consumer technology for 2 decades already.
You ever think about the college kid who can't afford that price? What about the family of five living on food stamps who can't just pony up the money for better hardware? What about large swaths of the population who are on fixed incomes?
The way software companies are going and your general attitude is, "Eh, this is old technology, anybody should be able to afford it, what's the big deal?"
Totally tone deaf to the poor and people living on the edge and others living on a fixed income. My mother in law is pushing 80 and I had to build her a new PC since she couldn't afford to purchase a new desktop to do her taxes on since now our state requires you to file electronically and shockingly, her tax software no longer runs on her 8 year old desktop.
It makes sense when you want to help someone to use the software they already paid for, instead of pointing an elderly person to the web and saying, "See? They have FREE versions, go grab one and figure it on your own!"
Sorry, but that to me is kind of a callous solution compared to what I did.
You're exaggerating. The first really plausible SSDs to appear in consumer PCs appeared in around 2006 or 2007, so maybe 15 years tops. For instance, Dell offered a computer with 32 GB of SSD storage in mid-2007. This was already not much storage at the time, and the drive alone cost over $500. This was arguably not a consumer affordable product at that price, and the laptops involved were actually the Latitude series (targeted to businesses) anyway. Apple followed this up in 2008 with a 64 GB SSD, but this was a $1000 upgrade.
Suffice it to say that a vast majority of people were only buying (and could probably only afford to buy) computers with rotational drives well into the 2010s. Many of the computers they bought are still running today. Many affordable computers that shipped with Windows 10 still had rotational drives. It's absurd to overlook a whole class of people who can't, unlike the wealthy, upgrade their MacBooks every 2 or 3 years. They probably don't have MacBooks to begin with. Parents are passing old hardware between children like hand-me-downs. That's before you even leave the United States.
I think your comment misses the point at a deeper level, which is that most people in this thread already have SSDs (I certainly do), but are disappointed that performance matters so little to many developers that they are fine with seeing software run at the same speed on today's insanely fast hardware that its predecessor did 20 years ago. Software is much more powerful than it was in the days of floppy disks, but it's not much more powerful than it was 15 years ago. We've seen a generational increase in performance, but we've wasted it. I think that's worth some disappointment.
I'd highlight IOPS. A $300 SSD is about 3000× faster than an HDD.
UNIX priorities don't handle this situation well because a low priority process is still technically immediately runnable and can cause priority inversions by clearing out all kinds of system caches that your foreground app was using.
And has more adware!
Void Linux, Debian, Slackware... just fine. Maybe with 720p video with a good Radeon 9800 video card for the AGP bus. But a Pentium III with SSE would run much better.
One would associate modern to something that is improved, better, faster. But that’s not the case with current state of software.
Run old technology with old software. It is ridiculous that consumer hardware is still being sold with crappy 5400 RPM disks in 2021. No, I have no interest in optimising my software for speeds that are 1/10th of my broadband.
Unless we're talking archival or huge storage necessities, stop complaining about modern OS or games running slow on a technology that hasn't realistically been updated in 20 years.
Do you expect Windows 10 to run on a Pentium II with 512MB RAM as well, because some version of Linux does?