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Comment by pietroq | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: Turbo Pascal was 38KB and that included the editor, compiler and debugger. It was lightning fast, compiling 10s of kSLOC in mere seconds on a 4.77MHz single-thread 8088 with 640KB of RAM. Now to build a Hello World full stack web app it can take 10+ minutes on a modern PC with 4GHz 16 core CPU and 64GB of RAM :)

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> Now to build a Hello World full stack web app it can take 10+ minutes on a modern PC with 4GHz 16 core CPU and 64GB of RAM :)

You’re doing something extremely wrong if this is the case.

Or more likely, the people complaining about “10 minute” web app compile times are just repeating hyperbole they found in other cynical comments.

cool story, now try writing a "Hello World full stack web app" in turbo pascal.

And another Youtube video is born...

It's actually quite easy if you can find a networking library: bind and listen on a socket on port 80, read text until you get GET / HTTP/1.1, discard whatever comes after, write back a response containing "Hello World" in the correct format (few lines of text) and that's it! A new full stack web app is born.

> Now to build a Hello World full stack web app it can take 10+ minutes on a modern PC with 4GHz 16 core CPU and 64GB of RAM :)

That's a bit of an exaggeration. What stack's hello world takes 10 minutes to build?

depending on your network, `npx create-react-app --template typescript` might take 10-15 minutes easily.

Well, yes, given an infinitely slow network any action depending on the network can take an infinite amount of time.

Since the discussion is around CPU hardware improvements, I don't think network speeds are too relevant.

but isn't it? We've moved a ton of the compute to using the network and I think that makes things a lot slower than they need to be... and a lot less optimized. And along with that, since we have essentially infinite storage we havne't gotten good at trimming the fat... this is yet another thing that steals from our compute.

Compiling a web app takes seconds as well. The common complaint is the resources needed to run the app as a consumer, particularly when most of the apps you use are all instances of chromium.

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