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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

4 has been true for over a decade.

Literally the only reason you need a computer less than 10 years old for day to day tasks is to keep up with the layers of javascript that are larded onto lots of websites. It's sad.

Edit: oh and electron apps. Sweet lord, shouldnt we have learned in the 90s with java applets that you shouldnt use a garbage collected language for user interfaces?

I use a GC'd language for UI every day -- Emacs -- and it runs well even on potato-tier hardware. The first GUI with all the features we'd recognize was written in a GC'd language, Smalltalk.

GCs introduce some overhead but they alone are not responsible for the bloat in Electron. JavaScript bloat is a development skill issue arising from a combination of factors, including retaining low-skill front end devs, little regard for dependency bloat, ads, and management prioritizing features over addressing performance issues.

There's also a lot of fast software written in Golang. GC has an undeserved bad reputation.

It's all nice and fast until the GC eats up all the CPU time under memory pressure (e.g. container memory limit). GC deserves its bad rep, even if GC implementations have gotten a lot better over time.

GC also disqualifies a language from ever being used for anything but userland programs.

Containers for Go software have no sense. You can cross compile stuff from anywhere to anywhere. And the binaries are self contained.

Which isn't really going to happen or be noticeable in this case. Yeah GC is slightly slower, but it's like blaming a 10-minute mile on your shoes. SDN or DBMS written in a GC'd language is probably not a good idea.

It's not that they lack the skill. It's that they don't care.

If they do care then they probably depend on someone who doesn't.

I hate the framing that developers are the people not caring. It's a ridiculous misrepresentation of the dynamics I've seen everywhere. Developers usually love optimizing stuff. However, they are under pressure to deliver functional changes. One could blame "the business" for not caring and not making time for shipping a quality product. However, these business decisions are made because that's what wins customers. Customers might complaint that that wasn't more lightweight software. But clearly their stated preference doesn't match their revealed preference.

My laptop is 11 years old and handles Slack quite well, and Jira. I eventually maxed it out at 32 GB and that probably helps. It's only an i7-4xxx though.

Java in the 90s was really slow. It got much faster with the JIT compiler. JavaScript and browsers got many optimizations too. My laptop feels faster now than it was in 2014 (it has always run some version of Linux.)

The other problem of Java was the non native widgets, which were subjectively worse than most of today's HTML/JS widgets, but that's a matter of taste.

I think even a blank Electron app is rather heavy because it's basically a whole web browser, which btw is written in C++. BUT my 2015 baseline MBP still feels fine.

I hate bloat and don't use Electron apps, but garbage collection is such a silly thing to pin it on. Tossing stuff like Lua and D in the same bin as the massive enterprise framework du jour is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

For me the big improvement from upgrading was better responsiveness while on a video call (no small improvement in the modern world)

What is wrong with garbage collection and UI?

Latency spikes, probably. But most UIs shouldn't be churning through enough allocations to lead to noticeable GC pauses, and not all of today's GCs have major problems with pause times.

I don't think Electron's problems are that simple.

From a non expert point of view, it’s about bringing in so much dead code. Like support for every os audio subsystem for a graphic app, or the whole sandboxing thing while you’re already accessing files and running scripts. Or even the table and float layout while everything is using flex. All those things need to be initialized and hooked up. At least Cordova (mobile) runs only on the system web engine which was already slimmed down.

I work on an Electron app, and we have a ticket open to investigate why the heck it's asking the OS for Bluetooth permissions even though we'd never use it. There are, of course, higher priority things to get to first, bugs that have larger effects. I'd love to be able to get to that one…

The renderer isn't going to pause on JS execution or GC.

I have a 2005 Core 2 Duo desktop running Windows 7. The only things that make it unusable are today's Internet and Electron apps. Everything else (including Visual Studio 2019!) runs at a performance comparable to my 2020 ThinkPad with Core i7. I know it's anecdotal, I'm just saying, if we fixed the bloat on the web, most people could just keep running their 10-15 year old PCs (using Linux if you want).

i use a 10 years old macbook air and honestly i can do everything i need, statistics, light programming, browsing and photo editing. perfect.

i wait it to break before moving on, changing for the sake to changing feels like waste.

I use a 10 years old macbook pro and the only thing I dislike is the battery life and the heat generated.

I simply can't afford the replacement 16" MBP right now. Hopefully it lasts another couple of years.

Surely, the new MacBook Airs offer better performance than a 10 year old MacBook Pro. The M3 is very reasonable, 16GB/512GB for $1,100 or $1,300 for 15 inch I think. Could be going lower too with M4 MacBook Air purportedly releasing in Mar or Apr.

I have cheapest air 8gig and its just fine for anything i do if i dont open 80tabs. But for sure wait for M4 as 16gig ram will be the base model. Coworker just got MacMini m4 and i dont see why that machine wouldnt be enough for 90% of people.

My ten year old computer has an SD card slot and an HDMI port.

I would like to replace it with something that has an SD card slot and an HDMI port, as I use those frequently and don't want to deal with adapter solutions.

I just wish they upped the storage a bit. 512GB on an $1100 machine in 2025 just feels like a bad deal, especially if you already have a machine from 10 years ago that has the same amount.

But has it been true for the type of person who runs CPU benchmarks?

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