this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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It's a different world now though. I could go into detail of the differences, but suffice to say you cannot compare them.
Having said that, Windows lately seems to just be slow on very modern systems for no reason I can ascertain.
I swapped back to Linux as primary os a few weeks ago and it's just so snappy in terms of ui responsiveness. It's not better in every way. But for sure I never sit waiting for windows to decide to show me the context menu for an item in explorer.
Anyway in short, the main reason for the difference with old and new computer systems is the necessary abstraction.
That's complete nonsense I'm afraid. While abstractions are necessary, the bloat of modern software absolutely isn't. A lot of the bloat isn't fundamental, but a result of things growing through accretion, and people papering over legacy designs instead of starting fresh.
The selection pressures of the industry do not favor efficiency. Software developers are able to write inefficient software and rely on hardware getting faster. Meanwhile, hardware manufacturers benefit from bloated software because it creates demand for new hardware.
Phones are a perfect example of this in action. Most of the essential apps on the phone haven't changed in any significant way in over a decade. Yet, they continue getting less and less performant without any visible benefit for the user. Imagine if instead, hardware stayed the same and people focused on optimizing software to be more efficient over the past decade.
Except it's not nonsense. I've worked in development through both eras. You need to develop in an abstracted way because there are so many variations on hardware to deal with.
There is bloating for sure, and of course. A lot is because it's usually much better to use an existing library than reinvent the wheel. And the library needs to cover many other use cases than your own. I encountered this myself, where I used a Web library to work with releases on forgejo, had it working generally, but then saw there was a library for it. The boilerplate to make the library work was more than I did to just make the Web requests.
But that's mostly size. The bloat in terms of speed is mostly in the operating system I think and hardware abstraction. Not libraries by and large.
I'm also going to say legacy systems being papered over doesn't always make things slower. Where I work, I've worked on our legacy system for decades. But on the current product for probably the past 5-10. We still sell both. The legacy system is not the slower system.
Abstraction does not have to imply significant performance loss.
It does. It definitely does.
If I write software for fixed hardware with my own operating system designed for that fixed hardware and you write software for a generic operating system that can work with many hardware configurations. Mine runs faster every time. Every single time. That doesn't make either better.
This is my whole point. You cannot compare the apollo software with a program written for a modern system. You just cannot.
I'm not disagreeing that it's different. It's a more fair comparison to compare it to embedded software development, where you are writing low level code for a specific piece of hardware.
I'm just saying that abstraction in general is not an excuse for the current state of computer software. Computers are so insanely fast nowadays it makes no sense that Windows file Explorer and other such software can be so sluggish still.
Exactly my point though. My original point was that you cannot compare this. And the main reason you cannot compare them is because of the abstraction required for modern development (and that happens at the development level and the operating system you run it on).
The Apollo software was machine code running on known bare metal interfacing with known hardware with no requirement to deal with abstraction, libraries, unknown hardware etc.
This was why my original comment made it clear, you just cannot compare the two.
Oh one quick edit to say, I do not in any way mean to take away from the amazing achievement from the apollo developers. That was amazing software. I just think it's not fair to compare apples with oranges.
Dxvk would like a word