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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

It's been a while since I've programmed in Java. I wonder how good the concurrency stuff is these days. On a somewhat related note I was talking to a team from a random bay area company on how they switched from Java/Spring to Node and that Node is slower but since it's single threaded they load balance a bunch of servers and in practice it's just as fast when considering the developer productivity.

Compute is really cheap these days, so I wonder how much it's worth it to squeeze every drop of performance out now.

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> Compute is really cheap these days, so I wonder how much it's worth it to squeeze every drop of performance out now.

And that's why every single Electron app is slower on a modern 4.7 GHz 8 core CPU than a (although not as pretty) native app on a single core CPU in 1999. Spotify is slow as molasses and has less features than foobar2000, MS Teams is slower than any messenger I used in 2005, and all those Postman-like apps are just a horror to use compared to a simple bash script with wget.

Case in point: I cannot use MS Teams on my state of the art computer when I'm compiling. It's just so slow to type and switch chats.

> and all those Postman-like apps are just a horror to use compared to a simple bash script with wget.

Personally I like having collections of requests, automatic formatting of responses, dedicated fields to enter headers into, automatic parsing of cURL / HAR etc, the ability to generate code in various languages...

There's a lot more to most of these Postman-like apps than just making requests!

Though I have seen Insomnia just completely choke up on large responses (10s of MBs) that Sublime renders in a flash - so you're not completely wrong, just throwing the baby out with the bathwater :)

Compute is cheap if you're doing trivial things that doesn't require much compute.

Flip side is that this is true for everyone. If you're only doing trivial things that could have been done 20 years ago, you really don't have much competitive advantage. It's difficult to be competitive in the area of solving easy problems.

> Compute is cheap if you're doing trivial things that doesn't require much compute.

A lot of the work on the web/API side is I/O bound (e.g. waiting for network I/O to database) so unless throughput is your game (e.g. Stackoverflow), it seems that Node is "good enough" for most web/API work.

It is I/O bound because you aren't using the available compute as much as you could.

Modern hardware is insanely powerful. Like it's absolutely bonkers how much you can do on a modern computer. Although most modern applications have capabilities on par with a 2006 flash game.

All true, but there's a point of nuance: because cloud is all virtualized, you are taking advantage of the underlying high performance modern hardware because a serverless Node function is one of who know how many on the physical hardware.

The vast, vast majority of "business code" even at startups and unicorns like AirBNB and Uber is not doing "compute-bound" things. They're all basically fancy CRUD apps.

Yeah, you can do more though, is my point. The CRUD market is pretty crowded.

Feels like a lot of the AI hype is the sudden discovery that modern computers are actually pretty fast and squandered doing book-keeping in small-to-medium SQL tables (not that you need LLMs to do interesting things with them).

Basically anything that required a data center in the year 2000 you can do on a powerful desktop PC today.

Yes, back in 2004 DHH created Rails on an 800Mhz PPC iBook with 256Mb RAM and launched Basecamp for the first year on a server with the same amount of RAM. A bargain basement VPS comes with 4 times the RAM these days.

Uber - are you kidding? Their shortest route algorithms are extremely CPU-intensive.

And how much of their codebase is this? 0.5%, if that?

Compute is cheap if you only run one program on your computer. The moment two or more "compute is cheap" programs run on a computer is the moment when cheap is not so cheap anymore.

Nothing like IntelliJ crashing during a video conference and then indexing your entire project from scratch... Encoding video in real time is CPU intensive, indexing a hundred libraries adds oil into the fire.

> I wonder how good the concurrency stuff is these days.

What were you missing? Java had threading, task, threadpool capabilities for ages. It comes with all kinds of concurrent collection classes and running something in parallel could be just one .parallelStream() away. There are also countless reactive frameworks that minimize thread count. Java Loom / green threads are available since Java 19 (hidden behind a flag).

Sorry, I meant in terms of developer ergonomics and ease of use, not purely compute performance.

The Reactive java frameworks are way more developer ergonomic than NodeJS if you use the virtual threads previews, otherwise you have to use callbacks/futures. But at least you have runtime type checking...

Vertx is way better than Node in a lot of ways, and faster, and easier to debug. Lock the event loop? You immediately get a log that you did something bad.

Like I just got an error in my IDE with TypeScript "ChartConfiguration is not generic". So I cmd+click into the type definition and it's a ChartConfiguration<T>. okay...

The whole ecosystem feels super fragile. It hurts productivity and moral. This just doesn't happen with Java.

> Compute is really cheap these days, so I wonder how much it's worth it to squeeze every drop of performance out now.

"What Andy [Moore of Intel] giveth, Bill [Gates of Microsoft] taketh away."

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law