Fast Software, the Best Software (2019)

MomsAVoxell an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, there are so many examples of this .. a recent one for me, is iStatMenu .. it just got to the point that waiting for it to start, alone, was sufficiently boring enough that I sought an alternative .. and of course, I realized, there's no reason not to use the Linux tooling I'm accustomed to, and so I have btop where iStatMenu used to live, kinda. btop doesn't get in the way, doesn't phone home, doesn't check a registration key, isn't harvesting key clicks, and .. so on .. its just small, light, and fast.

Well, with the encumbrance of it living in a terminal window, but I also live in the terminal window even on MacOS, so its a feature not a bug.

Point is, I wouldn't have this to say about it if iStatMenu had just been a little more discrete about its loading times ..

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giovannibonetti an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Shout-out to PowerSync for making it easier to develop fast offline-first mobile apps. It pushes data from Postgres/MySQL/SQL Server subscriptions to a SQLite into the user's mobile device, avoiding the need for many loading animations when the data is there ahead of time. My company is a customer and we recommend it.

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ungreased0675 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I run headless Alpine Linux (a minimal distro) in my homelab and it’s fast AF. The lag in Windows Explorer is sad when something like cd folder/folder is instant in Linux.

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marginalia_nu 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I really don't understand how you can even create software that feels as bad to use as Windows Explorer. It's like it's barely attached to reality. There's this weird floaty delay in everything. You copy a file, or did you? You're not sure. It hasn't updated yet. Oh, now the copy dialog appears with this progress bar that isn't showing progress. The dialog just sits there. Is something happening? I don't know. Many seconds later the dialog closes. But it hasn't showed up in the window yet... oh, now it did!

How is that even possible, especially with modern hardware? Like you'd almost have to build the file explorer around like a sqlite-based message queue with a 1500ms poll interval to get performance characteristics like this. Absolutely insane feats of architecture astronautism are no doubt required for this to happen.

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prodigalknight 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To be fair, cd folder/folder is also instant in a command line in Windows, it's just the GUI aspects that are slow. Comparing Windows Explorer to a terminal is comparing apples to oranges.

	▲	bayindirh an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think so. Windows is a GUI first OS, and Linux is a CLI first (or even CLI native) OS. You can't open a command line window in Windows without loading more than half of the desktop stack. In that sense, when a terminal (running on a desktop environment) in Linux is faster than Windows Explorer, it's a shame. When a big file explorer like Dolphin drives circles around native file explorer of Windows, that's a big ole embarrassment.

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sgarland 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don’t think I’ve ever noticed a difference in speed on the terminal between distros. Shells (or more accurately, plugins / frameworks - I recently gave up oh-my-zsh in favor of zimfw for that reason), yes, but not the terminal itself.

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ivanjermakov 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Google Maps has gotten so slow

When it comes to navigating (except public transit), hiking, and route building, Organic Maps[1] is very good. OSM data and offline-first is the way forward for detailed and _fast_ map experience.

For cycling route building I have to mention BRouter[2], which allows you to write a custom cost function that is used to tweak your route preferences.

[1]: https://organicmaps.app/

[2]: https://brouter.de/brouter/index.html

	▲	titanomachy 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Cool! I'm guessing no traffic data in organic maps? I'd still install it to use as a backup.

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wseqyrku 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it's the different feeling you get from using an end-to-end streaming service (compute, not videos) versus the one that does a lot of intermittent buffering. It's quite subtle actually. Using a vanilla language model can feel like that if it's also sufficiently small but they are going towards the opposite direction very rapidly now because cloud.

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countWSS an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The neglected part here is latency, speed itself can be masked by progress bars/animations, but having visible lag ruins the idea of speed and users treat it as slow vs animated loading bar.

	▲	archargelod an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe it's me who's weird, but I find animations as much worse - it's basically pointless and wastes slightly more time (even when program is fast enough!). The interface without animations feels snappier even if sometimes it takes a second to load. I disable any and all animations in software that I can - particularly in Android (via developer settings) and Linux (i3+vim vs something like KDE+VScode).

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williebeek an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I will read this entire article tomorrow while I wait for the Cursor UI and Visual Studio to finish loading.

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rossant 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I fully agree. I loathe slow software. I hate bloat. I love fast software. As a developer, I'm completely, even irrationally, obsessed with speed, performance optimization, and profiling. I wish more developers felt the same way.

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Sesse__ 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The sad part is that most employers don't care particularly about performance optimization skills (the economics don't work out, they can often just fix the problem cheaper with more hardware—and even if they can't, they mostly don't bear the cost themselves).

The fun part is that when your employer _does_ care about software optimization, few people are actually good at it and your skills are more exclusive :-)

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coldblues an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Irrational how? What higher values does it undermine for you to make fast software?

	▲	didgetmaster an hour ago \| parent [-]
		OP is probably referring to many engineering managers who think it is irrational to spend an hour in order to speed up a computing task that only shaves a few milliseconds off. Even when that software is widely used so the few milliseconds add up to thousands of hours in collective time savings. 'We don't pay for user's time, only your's', is the attitude. Again 'irrational'.

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jonhohle 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

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sylware 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Remove the specter and friends mitigations from your linux kernel, and your system will be significantly faster.

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fmajid 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, no software is the best software.

BTW, the title should say "(2019)".

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embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Best solution is no software, or as little code as possible. But that the best software is no software isn't very practical or actionable :)

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thunderbong 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No code is faster than no code

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sfn42 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Faster at doing nothing?

	▲	benj111 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes. If you want to do foo. You don't need framework bar to load baz or call home to qux. That's all added complexity that isn't inherent to the task. So we aren't talking about not doing bar. We are talking about not doing all the other things that aren't for the benefit of the user.

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pgisapedo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No way I wanna chat with my oven

	▲	mike_hock 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Got any burning questions today?

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jdw64 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Fast and efficient software varies depending on the local context, but for me, I think I'd be fine with something slower as long as it's convenient enough. After all, once it passes a certain threshold, I can barely even notice the speed difference anyway.

I wonder what OP's thinks of IDEs like VSCode. Would they see it as heavy and not great because it's Electron-based? But I find IDEs convenient.

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Ygg2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Honestly, I'm in partially disagree camp. What matters is how much time it saves.

A good WYSIWYG editor will run circles around the fastest text editor. Even if WYSIWYG is a bit slower to open.

It would be preferable for software to be more focused and faster over time, but that doesn't attract people to it.

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FrankRay78 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Slop or not, I enjoyed reading it. And could relate.

	▲	HelloUsername 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Previous discussion in 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20517144