[gazelleeatslion]

On a new MBP M1 w16GB RAM it is really snappy.

For a mere thousands of dollars you can join the fun.

I imagine by M2 though this golden year will be far gone as everyone increases even more how much resources their apps eat.

[systemvoltage]

PMs have gotten addicted to the sugar rush of features and developers to fried salty frameworks, creating a culture of obesity in software engineering. This needs to stop. Every prod test should go through a 10 year old system and perform satisfactorily.

[josephg]

I couldn't agree more.

I have a 4 year old laptop that cost me $3000. Xcode is so laggy sometimes that if I type, it'll miss keystrokes and words come out garbled beyond recognition. A few weeks ago some source code I downloaded from github wouldn't compile because the swift compiler spent too long doing type inference, and decided to error out.

I'm haunted by a vision of computing. In the vision, us software folks just add bloat to everything until it starts feeling gluggly and slow on our modern expensive computers. Then we optimize our programs just enough to keep them running vaguely ok on whatever hardware is on our desks.

The only way to have a snappy computer running modern software is via the tireless work of hardware engineers. Whenever a big hardware performance improvement comes (like the M1), there's a window of a year or so where if you upgrade, everything will run fast again. And of course, all the devs with the new machines stop optimizing their programs and gradually everything slows down again. Eventually our software goes back to being as slow as it was before, except if you didn't upgrade your computer, now it barely functions.

I want off this ride. My 6 year old FreeBSD server is somehow still snappy and responsive. Maybe the answer is to just not run modern desktop software.

[krono]

Hardware has 0 to do with the 10 second loading spinners on every other random route change.