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Comment by antod | Hacker News Reader

Back in the day I had W2K Pro running (very slowly) on a 66MHz 486. XP was only 18 months or so behind that, and the system requirements probably weren't much different. Wouldn't wanted to have to use it for anything though.

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I did some Java development on windows NT 3.51 and a 486 (33Mhz?) back in 1996. Worked fine. That was considered a fast machine at the time. I used Ultraedit and IBM's jikes incremental compiler. We were building some applet. Builds took a few seconds with jikes (as opposed to using javac that came with the jdk). There were no ant, maven, or gradle wasting more time. I had a little batch file that set up the classpath just right and then called the compiler.

That setup was actually faster than building kotlin projects on my current mac M1 laptop. Of course it's doing more stuff these days but build times seem a constant through the ages. Better hardware just leads to more complicated tooling.

Something is wrong with your story, possibly the year (or you lived in a poor place). The 486 DX33 was released in 1990 and was lower midrange in 1994. In 1996, it was more or less outdated. I had that problem, a slow 486 in 1996 ;)

It was a university computer. They wouldn't have had the latest and greatest. Pentium was released in 1993.

I had a 33MHz 386 in 1998 while my friends were playing quake on their early pentiums. It was hard to get DOS games at that time, being stuck on civI and wolfenstein…

By 1998 a 486 CPU would've been be cheap enough.

Basically free, my first upgrade a year or two earlier was a 486DX2-66 CPU + board "acquired" from an open container in front of a recycling operation.

Gradle is such a piece of shit, sad it became the default for Spring Boot. Maven sucks too but at least its fast.

I think it's the difference between getting stabbed and shot. Not a lot of love for either. But I can work with both and gradle seems less hassle these days. Especially if you are doing Kotlin.

I love waiting for the "Daemon" to start and twiddle my thumbs for 10 seconds before anything happens, all the while sacrificing 500MB of memory.

I wrote an Android app. Around 100000 lines of Pascal (+50% more in dependencies) and 10000 lines of Kotlin.

It takes four times 10 seconds to compile the Pascal code to multiple platforms and like 4 minutes to run gradle and compile the Kotlin code.

I do not know why it would be so slow

I had pentium 100mhz in 1996. 486 was not considered a fast machine

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