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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

Nah, nah, it's about damn time software engineers start giving a shit about performance again.

...because we've already got all the computing power we'll ever need? You think software developers not caring about performance is why we can't quickly simulate weather systems or protein folding or do large-scale ML?

I'd settle for text editors that don't lock up when I type an open paren. Or use entire sticks of RAM at rest.

> text editors that don't lock up when I type an open paren

This miiiiight be just you. Even sublime text (forget vim or another cli editor) runs fine on ancient hardware.

What type of files are you editing?

> Or use entire sticks of RAM at rest.

I'd hope my text editors would use as much ram as it needs in order to give me the smoothest experience. If possible, that means storing the whole file in RAM (up to a set limit).

Stop using editors written in Javascript by overpaid new-grads

Some here are old enough to remember "emacs: eight megabytes and constantly swapping", back when a stick of RAM could have been 8 Megabytes...

GGP comment seemed to mostly be caring about personal computers, in which field we do have most the computing power we will need.

For those kinds of hard problems, the advances seem to be coming in massively parallel computing of the kind that is advancing (the GPGPU has transformed ML, for example).

Yes, but the amount of computation that is practical to put in a car or a phone probably isn't going to increase much.

With self-driving cars, it definitely is.

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