Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

He's got some good points but it is a garbled argument.

Really I don't know about JS Hell, but C++ compilers aren't slow because nobody has tried to speed them up, rather the nature of C++ is that it is slow to compile. Every so often somebody rage quits C++ and starts a language like Go because of this.

The real data point is that Clojurescript is only slightly slower to execute than real Clojure, but takes two orders of magnitude more time to compile.

He's right though that people have to move on past Electron. Lately I have been building applications in Python/tkinter and I still can't get over how fast it is on both my mac and PC both to start up and when running. There is none of the "spend 30 seconds watching a splash screen" that we're are accustomed to with advanced applications in Java and C++ (eg. PyCharm and Photoshop)

Another thing that impresses me is the size and speed of small GUI applications written in C for Windows such as this little utility:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk...

I think MacOS is also part of the problem. Lately I added a new keyboard to my Mac and I thought I was having Bluetooth problems but the main reason it was unresponsive was that the spellchecking baked into the OS would cause keyboard input to lock up for a few seconds periodically.

Later on I noticed that web browsers on Mac OS (Safari/Firefox/Chrome) seem to "go to lunch" and not respond to mouse clicks for 5 seconds every so often. I imagine this impacts Electron apps.

I think people have been "frog boiled" into expecting computers to be slow.

> There is none of the "spend 30 seconds watching a splash screen" that we're are accustomed to with advanced applications in Java and C++ (eg. PyCharm and Photoshop)

Are your applications of similar size and complexity as these Java and C++ applications? Photoshop is a huge beast.

I ask because I’ve written C++ GUI applications that start up instantly (sub second). I’ve also written Python GUI applications that did not. It depends on what and how much you’re doing on startup. Most GUI applications aren’t as large as PyCharm or Photoshop and start up significantly faster, regardless of implementation language.

> Later on I noticed that web browsers on Mac OS (Safari/Firefox/Chrome) seem to "go to lunch" and not respond to mouse clicks for 5 seconds every so often.

I’ve not had this problem personally, but I have had Chrome lock up my entire system on Ubuntu (input including mouse clicks simply not doing anything, but if I happen to have another window open I can alt tab to that and then everything is good again, or at least I can kill Chrome).

I've made smaller apps with JavaFX which still take annoyingly long to start up compared w/ similar tkinter apps.

Java was once notoriously slow and still has slower JVM startup time than C++. Maybe JavaFX is slower. I’ve not written any GUI applications in java nor do I use many java applications. However, my experience with C++ has been very different: things can run and start very fast. If they don’t, it’s because either you did something very wrong or because it’s doing a lot of work that would be equally slow elsewhere.

I’ve used Qt, WxWidgets, FLTK, GTK+ and a FOX as my GUI toolkit over the years and, for my small applications, all of those start so fast I don’t notice it. The only slowdown I’ve noticed is with Qt when using QtQuick (I assume because it has to load, parse and then execute QML — essentially JavaScript — as well as the C++ code). It’s still faster starting up than PyCharm and Photoshop for anything that I’ve used it for.

Ive always wondered why java starts so slow. A simple hello world takes a second or so. Most interpreted languages do a lot better.

Once it has warmed up, it's close to C however.

>Once it has warmed up

that's the problem, a lot of workflows even on really complex applns like photoshop are firing up a project for a couple of minutes to get some output or correct something. enough time is wasted warming up that people who can afford it just leave the applications running. i just keep whatever VS project i'm working on running for eg coz the startup times are painful and i have RAM to spare

Interestingly enough, since we have Qt mentioned in this thread...

Somewhere between 4.8 and 5.1 (I can't remember exactly when), QtWebKit introduced a compile-time macro-assembler setup. This was used to generate a "first pass" product of the JIT engine output, to reduce the JavaScript engine warmup time.[ß]

This was at a time when I had already wondered aloud, on several occasions, how long it would take for browser vendors to allow downloading precompiled JIT blobs for speeding up the most expensive parts of whatever they wanted their visitors to run. This never happened. The world hopped over the fledgling JS-AOT craze and came up with WebAssembly instead.

ß: the construction also introduced Ruby as a build requirement, because of course the macro-assembler generation was done with Ruby.

A simple hello world takes about 262ms on Windows 10 with Java 11.

Which can be further reduced by making use of AOT compiler, or SubstrateVM.

Additionally, Java always enjoyed the ability to AOT compile to native code, even though it was mostly available via third party commercial JDKs, or gcj for the adventurous ones.

Qt slows down when it processes [large] images. Anything you want to display on screen has to be processed to a QtPixmap structure. When I last used it, with sufficiently large textures and/or splash screen images, this operation could take long enough to cause the rendering thread to skip frames. (In an embedded x86 environment we were talking about some hundreds of milliseconds.)

The other part where Qt can really slow down is when you have to instantiate a 3D driver module. That can block absolutely everything.

> Are your applications of similar size and complexity as these Java and C++ applications? Photoshop is a huge beast.

It's not really the application size though. It's whether you load/initialise things eagerly at startup, or do you do it as needed/in the background.

If you see a splash screen, you know it's the first option. The slash screen is visible and active after all - the app itself is loaded.

Yes, macOS is gradually becoming slow.

Worst thing is the Finder. Moving files between folders used to be instant. Now it sometimes takes a few seconds for files to appear in a folder after you drop them.

I have no clue why.

I tell myself that the problem is that the old, experienced programmers are leaving, and inexperienced young programmers are too busy adding new features (it works! good enough!) to make sure anything actually works well. And of course that never would have happened if Steve Jobs was still alive. (Just kidding. Steve Jobs loved fancy graphics that made everything slow)

I’ve noticed iCloud sync is sometimes the issue. If dropping files into/around enabled folders the sync process invokes immediately and uses a lot of CPU similar to Dropbox sync.

Do you use google drive? I experience the same file issue on my work laptop where I can’t uninstall the drive daemon.

https://piunikaweb.com/2018/03/01/google-blames-apple-for-dr...

> I tell myself that the problem is that the old, experienced programmers are leaving, and inexperienced young programmers are too busy adding new features (it works! good enough!) to make sure anything actually works well.

You joke, but this is a real issue. It's hard to find any other explanation for why the quality of commonly-used software has taken such a massive nosedive in the latest 15 years, outside the FLOSS world (CADT syndrome notwithstanding!) even as software was supposed to be "eating the world" by now! Windows Vista, anyone? (Or, as some folks in Microsoft marketing used to call it rather presciently, Windows "Mojave"?) I guess it just goes to show that, yes, systems programming still matters, as do projects that attempt to open it up to a far broader audience while keeping and even strengthening its focus on rigor, performance and correctness.

People are attracted to shiny so companies prioritize making everything shiny as often as possible. The average used had to look for subtle clues to find out whether their machine was windows 95, 98/SE, 2000, ME, or XP with a classic skin.

Now, the average user has to totally relearn every few years how to do less of the things they could do before. There’s an obsession with reinventing the wheel that takes precedence to stability.

I’ve been a professional software developer for over 20 years.

Commercial software is generally much better than it was 15 years ago.

Yes, Vista was bad but Win7 was good. You should have seen Win3 or 95 though. You’d expect to have the computer crash multiple times a day.

Of course, anything was good when compared with vista. Win 3 and Win 95 are not directly comparable, as they were running on severely underpowered hardware (and they could not pursue the sort of simplification that made OSs on other low-end, "home computer" machines of the day more workable overall); Vista does not have that excuse given the growth in system requirements wrt. its predecessor.

(Even Microsoft had to give up not only on Vista but on Windows 7 itself for "low-end platforms" - they ultimately promoted a "Starter" version of the latter that was specifically built to never even try to launch more than three apps at the same time! I won't bother to attempt even the most cursory comparison with what a proper, FLOSS alternative can still achieve on the same hardware, even today...that would be tedious and ultimately beside the point.)

I’ve noticed this, too. I suspect specter/meltdown mitigations. But that’s purely speculative... (See what I did there?)

Keep in mind that it's not always the developers that dictate when things get released; as companies get bigger these decisions are made less by the creators and more by the management/PM cabals.

Software Date Driven Development is a scourge, but shareholders (or potential purchasers) scream for their instant ROI, and this is what we get.

“Programmers” are definitely not the ones making calls on stuff like this. There may well be some generational turnover, but the value of performance for these sorts of tasks is not judged by the folks implementing them. Product owners are the ones who decide on the priorities. And keeping stuff like this snappy is undoubtedly a lot of work that mid range managers are reluctant to stick their neck out over. So yeah you need someone at the top who cares about it. But I’m guessing so few people even use the finder for file management day to day these days that it rarely even comes up.

"Programmers" make some of these decisions, "Management" make some of these decisions. Professional programmers generally don't get to pick what tools they use 100% of the time, but they do get to decide some of the time.

I'd argue that programmers rarely get to make decisions like performance. Esp. in a large corp, where responsibility is diffused.

> Lately I have been building applications in Python/tkinter and I still can't get over how fast it is on both my mac and PC both to start up and when running.

Has the GUI of tkinter apps improved over the past couple of years? I have yet to see an interface built with tk that doesn’t look like it was meant for Win95.

For native looking tkinter, there's ttk (themed tkinter).

I'm always suspicious when people say something can be done. Why isn't it the default then? Because there is some drawback to that choice. But what is it?

haha, well for example there's an issue open since 2012 about how common convenience dialogs don't work with themed tkinter although i don't really understand the comments about IDLE supposedly doing it automatically but not yet?. i think tkinter is a tool you reach for coz you know python only to realize you can't really write bulletproof UI in it coz of some workaround or issue.

https://bugs.python.org/issue15191

I used tkinter a few years ago, since it was available on Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi. It looked bad on Linux, and it seemed tkinter was not in active development or getting a lot of attention. I remember not having found any sane workflow for how to place GUI elements and struggled to place a bunch of text boxes and buttons.

Reasonable or not, I have a hard time accepting workflows worse than what Microsoft Access or VB 6.0 had.

> I think people have been "frog boiled" into expecting computers to be slow.

So much this!

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