While the author says that much of it can be attributed to the layers of software in between to make it more accessible to people, in my experience most cases are about people being lazy in their developing of applications.

For example, there was a case of how Claude Code uses React to figure out what to render in the terminal and that in itself causes latency and its devs lament how they have "only" 16.7 ms to achieve 60 FPS. On a terminal. That can do way more than that since its inception. Primeagen shows an example [0] of how even the most terminal change filled applications run much faster such that there is no need to diff anything, just display the new change!

[0] https://youtu.be/LvW1HTSLPEk

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Cthulhu_ 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It makes me wish more graphics programmers would jump over to application development - 16.7ms is a huge amount of time for them, and 60 frames per second is such a low target. 144 or bust.

	▲	moring 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I don't think graphics devs changing over would change much. They would probably not lament over 16ms, but they would quickly learn that performance does not matter much in application development, and start building their own abstraction layer cake. It's not even that performance is unimportant in absolute terms, but rather that the general state of software is so abysmal that performance is the least of your problems as a user, so you're not going to get excited over it.
	▲	ferguess_k 24 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It's mostly on the business side. If business doesn't care then developers have no choice. Ofc the customers need to care too, looks like we don't care either...in general.
	▲	pjmlp 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		No need for graphics programmers, anyone that is still around coding since the old days, does remember on how to make use of data structures, algorithms, and how to do much with little hardware resources. Maybe the RAM prices will help bringing those skills back.
	▲	jacquesm 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		And embedded too. But then again, they do what they do precisely because in that environment those skills are appreciated, and elsewhere they are not.
	▲	bluGill an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That wouldn't make any difference. Graphics programmers spend a lot of effort on performance because spending a lot of $$$$ (time) can make an improvement that people care about. For most applications nobody cares enough about speed to pay the $$$ needed to make it fast. Many application programmers could make things faster - but their boss says good enough, ship it, move to a new feature that is worth far more to me.

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elliotec 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, I think a lot of this can be attributed to institutional and infrastructural inertia, abstraction debt, second+-order ignorance, and narrowing of specialty. People now building these things are probably good enough at React etc. to do stuff that needs to be done with it almost anywhere, but their focus needs to be ML.

The people that could make terminal stuff super fast at low level are retired on an island, dead, or don't have the other specialties required by companies like this, and users don't care as much about 16.7ms on a terminal when the thing is building their app 10x faster so the trade off is obvious.