I'll argue that, as a percent, the number of people who can write proper multi-threaded code has only diminished over the years.
And we see the result, despite the massive increase in computing power, software in general has become slower and bloated.
If you have "months to write fizzbuzz" levels of resources available, sure, you can microoptimize everything. Except in practice you can't, because the amount of effort needed for this kind of microoptimization is quadratic or worse in the complexity of the problem you're actually solving.
For a realistic-sized problem, if you write solutions in C and Python with the same amount of effort from equally skilled programmers, the Python version will almost certainly be faster, because they'll have had a lot more time available to spend prototyping and picking good algorithms rather than debugging undefined behaviour because they used the wrong combination of integer bit lengths.
It's a function of debugging time which is a function of the programmer's skills. I almost certainly fall into the Python subset though :/
Also, performance improvements pay for themselves over months and years while new features usually pay for themselves faster (at least they do in forecasts).
And finally, touching working code to make a performance improvement necessarily has some risk and that risk might be worth more than a year of cost savings from the improvement.
I disagree. I believe the majority of code is slow because it's written without any consideration at all to performance. I like Casey Muratori's philosophy of non-pessimization where true optmization (measuring, working hot spots) is rare and rarely necessary but massive speedups compared to the general state of the art are achievable by simply not writing code using patterns that are inherently slow. This isn't deep algorithmic stuff it's just avoiding copies and/or pointer chasing.
Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgoetgxecw8 <- Casey's most recent intro to non-pessimization
> For a realistic-sized problem, if you write solutions in C and Python with the same amount of effort from equally skilled programmers, the Python version will almost certainly be faster
The Advent of Code runs every year and I'm not sure about C (not something I track) but there are plenty of Rust submissions and while the Rust submissions take longer to come in, it's not THAT much longer. From memory it's like 2x on a timescale of minutes. The Python programs are not faster.
Advent of Code size problems is the best case scenario for Python. The difference in implementation time goes down as program size increases because you spend a larger fraction of the time figuring out what you're implementing.
The reason it's not done is mainly social and not technical. Ecosystems matter and this is particularly the case in graphical desktop environments where massive amounts of time and effort are required to re-implement features matching users' expectations (e.g. Flutter).
If we're talking a server side http app server then the library requirements are significantly lower and the libraries are generally there in almost any language. To keep the language comparison the same, it's not significantly slower to implement a CRUD backend in Rust than it is in Python. Depending on your specific setup and how much pre-prep is involved it can be faster. I'm not aware of any framework in a dynamic language that can produce production grade endpoint handlers that are as terse as a Rocket app heavily leveraging request guards. The guards handle validation, conversion, session context and db connection based on the endpoint parameter types so you just write the happy path which is 1-2 lines of code for CRUD.
> speed of refactors and maintainability
Dynamic languages are significantly worse for maintainability and refactoring. I say this as someone who generally gets paid to be a frontend developer and spent years writing both Python and Clojure professionally. Despite my arguments, I do not write server side Rust for work because team coherence is more important for doing my actual job (solving a customer's problem) than programming language and I'm the only person in my company who writes Rust. I've been doing this long enough that I accept the worse solution as the cost of doing business. My personal projects don't have this constraint so perf is orders of magnitude better in exchange for a lot more knowledge and a bit more design work.
The difference in code size between a good and a bad language goes up as program size increases, because a large codebase makes it harder to keep it all in your head and forces you to add more layers and duplication.
About the raw speed. Maybe you want to take a look at these nice benchmarks? https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
You don't have to ditch Java or C# for your app and use C or Rust instead. But you can write Java and C# in a more performant way while not sacrificing time to market, speed of refactors and maintainability.
Also, if performance, throughput, stability wouldn't be a thing, we have to wonder why Twitter switched from RoR to Java? Couldn't they just buy more servers instead?
Writing Java in a more performant way often means ditching OOP and using primitive types, primitive arrays everywhere instead, and also avoiding allocations up to the point where all objects are reused. Such code is just as slow to write and as error-prone as C, and way worse than C++ where at least you have RAII, generics, STL algorithms and zero-cost abstractions.
I would even go as far and say that OOP’s encapsulation pretty much exists just for this: the “ugly” implementation can reside inside a class and you only have to care about its public API from the outside.
In practice you only have so much attention and there are better places to spend it.
> Also, if performance, throughput, stability wouldn't be a thing, we have to wonder why Twitter switched from RoR to Java?
If raw speed matters we have to wonder why Twitter started with RoR, and only switched (mostly to Scala, not Java, AIUI) once they had tens of millions of users.
In a tiny handful of outlier cases where a given piece of code is run literally billions of times a day it eventually becomes worth doing performance microoptimisations. But only after you've confirmed that there's absolutely massive demand for this particular code and already done your iterative refactors and figured out what the code should do.
If people would pay more attention on how the data flows instead of Uncle Bob and GoF, they would not only end up with a cleaner software architecture but also with more performance.
That can both be correct. I use a std. data structures for many things even if some prefix tree might be better for the operations I perform on a set. I don't think about that in most cases since computing power is cheaper than the additional work. If performance becomes a problem, I can optimize later.
Advent of Code isn't a realistic performance metric. Working software is for most software projects.
I don't/can't watch videos; I would be interested to see a written argument, but generally my view is that copies and pointer chasing are irrelevant because code is so far away from optimal already. You're right that code is mainly written without any consideration to performance, but that manifests itself first in poor choices of algorithm and/or datastructure. I don't think there's anything "deep" about, say, using a hashmap rather than searching linearly through a list; indeed I'd consider it easier to understand than avoiding copying.
> The Advent of Code runs every year and I'm not sure about C (not something I track) but there are plenty of Rust submissions and while the Rust submissions take longer to come in, it's not THAT much longer. From memory it's like 2x on a timescale of minutes. The Python programs are not faster.
Advent of Code is still extremely tiny programs, and Rust is a much much better language than C for thinking in.
I think this is more nuanced than that. Competitive programming actually gives fairly good insight here, because skilled programmers are placed under time constraints and obviously care about performance.
What you see, usually, is that programs that don't need maximum performance are often written in Python, which allows people to quickly write code that needs less debugging. But double the allotted time and the C programmer finally has their code finished and free of bugs, and they're beating the pants off of your Python code right out of the gate. You try and come up with clever ways to avoid copies and drive down the Big-O, but the C programmer comes up with the same thing just a bit behind you and leads most of the time because they get a free 10x speedup just because of the language they're using.
It's not surprising that the highest levels of competitive programming are dominated by C (and to a greater extent, C++) programmers, with Python use extremely rare, almost always reserved for rare, complicated algorithms that happen to bring a significant big-O improvement that justify the use of Python to write them.
Try to look at The Computer Language Benchmarks Game where all implementations are using the same algorithm. An optimized C implementation can be 300 times faster than Python.
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
The roads have been given extra lanes, and the total possible throughout of the road has increased. As a result, car manufacturers have decided that they can use a cheaper manufacturing process which makes slower cars. But when anyone complains, they point to the additional lanes and say ‘but the number of cars that get from point A to point B has increased, even if each trip is slower.’
The end user isn’t getting a choice when software developers make slower code each year. They have to buy more expensive hardware to keep up with the slowdowns of software developers.
In terms of your analogy, do you want more expensive cars that less people have?
Software developers could spend more time optimizing their code. But that means that are spending less time elsewhere, fixing bugs, adding features, developing other products.
“The new format bar” for slack and “huddles” (perhaps less antagonisingly) are examples of things that Slack has done seemingly to prove they’re still working on the program.
Despite the the features not being needed in the slightest.
IMO huddles happened because the pandemic moved so many more people remote that the need for a water-cooler replacement became much more obvious.
I, for one, don’t care that much for performance so my personal forks of projects are all feature oriented.
But if you care about performance this much then writing something high performance is the best way to find others like you.
The problem with modern software is that vendors encourage new developers to learn using heavyweight toolkits because lock-in is profitable in the long run. One day Electron will work with Go, but it will still be a plague.