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[-] truthfultemporarily@feddit.org 172 points 1 month ago

Only bad management is keeping everything from being crazy fast. No reason for today's programs to be slower than what we had a decade ago.

[-] Flower@sh.itjust.works 29 points 1 month ago

There's also a whole lot of abstraction layers in software these days. All kinds of frameworks, no code platforms, scripts and engines ask introduce their own delays when running software, all added to make time to market a bit shorter or just because of some tech fetish.

[-] masterspace@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Lol, "the C Programming language is an abstraction of assembly and I for one, won't have it!"

Some of those frameworks and no code platform bloat are because of that. Most are there to make working on large multi team software projects feasible.

[-] Flower@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 month ago

It's not the first time one team makes a module with an API. The other team needs a few lines of data from that module but the filter in the API is bad, so just retrieve millions of rows and apply your own filter to get the two rows. There is no event trigger, so keep polling those two lines every second. Multiply with dozens of modules and a bunch of politics that refuse to make changes and you get a very sluggish application.

[-] masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Sure yeah, this stuff happens all the time, and often persists until people start noticing the application being sluggish and they go and investigate and fix the slow points.

Alternatively you have tightly integrated software that only one team can work on and it takes years to come out and every time a feature needs to change its another 6 month job of reworking everything, and debugging and fixing security issues is a nightmare.

In most systems, not just computers, there's a tradeoff between a highly integrated and high performance design, vs a modularized loosely coupled one that's more adaptable and resilient.

Just look at automotives, Teslas have a unibody design that makes them cheap to build and low weight, that also makes them enormously expensive to repair and impossible to find aftermarket parts for.

Choosing maximally integrated is rarely the best path, there is always a middle ground, and one important difference between the paths is that it's usually easier to go from modular to integrated than vice versa.

[-] ag10n@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Windows OS updates and releases aren’t subject to this as it’s closed source

Whether human or machine, external factors are all internally decided

[-] morto@piefed.social 9 points 1 month ago

I remember when finishing my dissertation and thinking about how my sister did her one several years before me, in a computer that was considered unusable by the time I did mine, and both the work process and the finished result were pretty much the same. I had a computer that was astronomically better than she had, yet, everything was slow, just like she felt when she did her.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The CPU in an average consumer PC can do tens of billions of instructions per second now. 10,000,000,000+ instructions per second. And then it can also offload some work to other devices. Here, graphics card, deal with updating this display at 144Hz. Hey network card, take this buffer and squirt it out the ethernet port at a 1 gigabit line speed for me.

And even with all that help, it still takes for-fucking-ever to get shit done. What the fuck are all those instructions doing‽

[-] Mac@mander.xyz 12 points 1 month ago

Mine are all used up to block ads and trackers and page elements, then when they're done, I'm being throttled punitively by the service because i didn't watch their ads :(

[-] GalacticRobot@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

I think many programmers and business models have given up on programs running 'fast' but rather they just running and shoving them out quickly. Add in all the AI programming, and I don't see it getting better. It's basically like most people when they earn more income. The more speed and memory a computer has, the more programmers will use of it.

A computer from the 80's starts up a million times faster than any modern computer.

[-] kandykarter@lemmy.ca 19 points 1 month ago

That's nonsense. Every computer I own boots in under a minute. That was unheard of in the 90s, much less the 80s.

[-] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 month ago

Eehhh… this person is wrong about programmers and business models but DOS machines did boot really fast (my 486 boots to DOS in about 20 seconds) and C64s and Apple IIs and such were all ROM based and so booted instantly like a Super Nintendo.

[-] GalacticRobot@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

You realize most computers in the 80's instantly booted right? Flip power switch and they booted to an internal rom. I'm sorry, are you fairly young?

[-] cenzorrll@piefed.ca 4 points 1 month ago

I put an ssd in a laptop from 2003, it boots to desktop on antix just as fast as my T14 running opensuse.

When this laptop was running XP spinning rust, it took 5 minutes to get to desktop, 10 minutes to do anything useful. SSDs have made that possible, pretty much nothing to do with anything else.

My dad had a C64 that I'd play around with, and I can confirm, it booted in seconds. Loading a program was a different matter.

[-] binux@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago
[-] scops@reddthat.com 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Here is a 486 taking over three minutes to boot.

The person you replied to countered a broad generalization with an anecdote which probably matches the lived experience of most of us oldies who lived through the time. Your comment did not contribute to the conversation.

[-] thisbenzingring@lemmy.today 4 points 1 month ago

well now see, if it had a math coprocessor.... blah blah haha

[-] binux@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

Once again, that’s a single video of one example of an old computer booting up. It’s hardly irrefutable, like anything anecdotal. I’m not even disagreeing on the consensus of newer computers being undeniably faster, this is just a flimsy evidence regardless.

And frankly I don’t care about “contributing” as you describe it. That just amounts to adhering to everyone’s idea of contribution on social media, and I’m not Sisyphus, so…

[-] RoddyStiggs 1 points 1 month ago

Cool. My phone takes four.

this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
318 points (100.0% liked)

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