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Comment by cube13 | Hacker News Reader

You're still running on the blind assumption that Apple and Google are magically better at optimization than everyone else. I would not make that assumption, because, as I said before, optimization is hard. There's a billion variables that goes into your code's performance, and tiny changes can completely ruin performance-or make it awesome.

Look at Android(as an example). For the first few years of existence, the OS was plagued with issues of bad battery life due to poorly optimized code and bugs. Android 3.0 was basically scrapped as an OS due to bad performance.

iOS 5.0 had absolutely horrible battery life due to a bug. The Nitro Javascript engine isn't available outside of Safari, too.

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So you are suggesting that it is out of reach for Google and Apple to publish libraries and frameworks that are optimized for a specific hardware platform (ARM A7 + A15) or is it that since Windows X already optimizes Intel / AMD offerings to an overwhelming extent that the differential would be moot?

It's out of reach for anyone - Google, Apple or Microsoft - to optimize their libraries enough to make up for CPU performance differences.

The only data point I can think of is this JSON benchmark:

http://soff.es/updated-iphone-json-benchmarks

...where Apple beats three community-developed libraries. But maybe it just wasn't that hard to beat them.

I'm also skeptical because I don't see how Apple has any incentive to optimise code ever. Their devices (ARM & x86) are doubling in CPU power left and right while the UX basically stays the same. The second-to-last generation inevitably feels sluggish on the current OS version...which just happens to be the time when people usually buy their next Apple device. Why should they make their codebase harder to maintain in that environment?

>...where Apple beats three community-developed libraries.

That's just in one very restricted area (JSON parsing) where there are TONS of third-party libraries of varying quality for the exact same thing. Doesn't mean much in the big picture.

>I'm also skeptical because I don't see how Apple has any incentive to optimise code ever.

And yet, they use to do it all the time in OS X, replacing bad performing components with better ones. From 10.1 on, each release actually had better performance on the SAME hardware, until Snow Leopard at least. They had hit a plateau there I guess where all the low hanging fruit optimisations were already made.

Still, it makes sense to optimise severely, if not for anything else to boast better battery life.

> Still, it makes sense to optimise severely, if not for anything else to boast better battery life.

No doubt about 10.0-10.5/10.6. But that seems to have been an afterthought for the last two OS X releases:

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/os-x-battery-life-ana...

And has there ever been an iOS update that has made things faster on the same hardware?

I don't think that Apple is intentionally making things slower, which is what I'm trying to say with the JSON parser (it is easy to write a wasteful implementation). But in the big picture, they're not optimising much either.

Look at https://github.com/johnezang/JSONKit, which is fast.

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