September 25th, 2019 at 12:25 AM
Nice post, +rep. Thank you for sharing!
I wish that people would spend more time attempting to properly optimize applications. Interpreted languages (especially "slower" languages, such as Python) are becoming increasingly common. Java is relatively decent as far as performance is concerned. C is obviously great. C#, an interpreted language, is gaining some traction over classic C and C++, and overall, people care so much more about cross platform options than they do about efficient, high performance options.
It's to be expected. 15 years ago, when the best anyone had was a Pentium 3 or a Pentium 4, before gigabytes of RAM and multi-core processors, people had no real choice but to make sure their applications were highly optimized. As a result, if the application had any sort of demanding system requirements, you would pretty much have to do it in Java or C. Python wasn't going to cut it.
Nowadays, this is much less of a focus, as you mentioned. For example, Mac OS is now integrating a new cross platform toolkit and a set of libraries to allow developers to easily port iOS applications to Mac OS (coming with the new version of the OS next month). Much of the groundwork on a lot of this had already been completed for Mac OS Mojave, which is out now. Several iOS apps (such as Stocks, News, and Reminders) were ported to the desktop as a part of the release. These apps, despite launching very quickly on the iPhone, are very slow to launch on a presumably more powerful MacBook. (Although some of the newest iPhones have a total smoke show of a CPU built in. Apple truly undersold these things.
So many additional libraries have to be dynamically loaded that launching times can easily extend into the several seconds range. These were the kinds of launch times you would expect from a pre Core-2-duo CPU (e.g. Pentium 4, etc.). After 10-15 years, we haven't made a whole world of progress in terms of end-user performance (though we've definitely made strides in the right direction). Instead, all of this extra computational power is used in helping the developer.
In the end, I don't think this will be changing. Developers seem to work for other developers, and not so much for the user. If the development can be done more easily, or be ported to more devices, the incentives for developers to work on projects is greater. And as a result, the ecosystem of developers is larger, more diverse, and more qualified. We end up with more applications that have more features, and are ported to more devices. But the end-user ultimately has to pay the price in the performance gains that they would otherwise see.
I wish that people would spend more time attempting to properly optimize applications. Interpreted languages (especially "slower" languages, such as Python) are becoming increasingly common. Java is relatively decent as far as performance is concerned. C is obviously great. C#, an interpreted language, is gaining some traction over classic C and C++, and overall, people care so much more about cross platform options than they do about efficient, high performance options.
It's to be expected. 15 years ago, when the best anyone had was a Pentium 3 or a Pentium 4, before gigabytes of RAM and multi-core processors, people had no real choice but to make sure their applications were highly optimized. As a result, if the application had any sort of demanding system requirements, you would pretty much have to do it in Java or C. Python wasn't going to cut it.
Nowadays, this is much less of a focus, as you mentioned. For example, Mac OS is now integrating a new cross platform toolkit and a set of libraries to allow developers to easily port iOS applications to Mac OS (coming with the new version of the OS next month). Much of the groundwork on a lot of this had already been completed for Mac OS Mojave, which is out now. Several iOS apps (such as Stocks, News, and Reminders) were ported to the desktop as a part of the release. These apps, despite launching very quickly on the iPhone, are very slow to launch on a presumably more powerful MacBook. (Although some of the newest iPhones have a total smoke show of a CPU built in. Apple truly undersold these things.
So many additional libraries have to be dynamically loaded that launching times can easily extend into the several seconds range. These were the kinds of launch times you would expect from a pre Core-2-duo CPU (e.g. Pentium 4, etc.). After 10-15 years, we haven't made a whole world of progress in terms of end-user performance (though we've definitely made strides in the right direction). Instead, all of this extra computational power is used in helping the developer.
In the end, I don't think this will be changing. Developers seem to work for other developers, and not so much for the user. If the development can be done more easily, or be ported to more devices, the incentives for developers to work on projects is greater. And as a result, the ecosystem of developers is larger, more diverse, and more qualified. We end up with more applications that have more features, and are ported to more devices. But the end-user ultimately has to pay the price in the performance gains that they would otherwise see.
