Comment by majormajor

> Nobody prioritizes performance anymore unless for the critical cases where it matters (video games, transcoding video, and the like). What people (companies) prioritize is developer time. For example: you might not want to use Rust because its steep learning curve means you’ll spend more time learning than delivering, or its higher compiler times mean that you’ll spend more time waiting for the compiler than shipping debugging production. Or another example: you might not want to develop native apps because that means “duplicate work”, so you reach out for a cross-platform web framework. That is, Electron.

Small but important disagreement IME: what companies prioritize is time to market which is often the same as developer time but importantly different in one key way: it means it's no longer an issue of "lazy developers" but it's a market question of "what will users tolerate."

I don't say that just to shift blame, but because it's really key to understanding what's going on - as the article notes, performance "where it matters" has gotten better and better over time.

We also have a few other improvements in the last two decades that have made things like "app startup time" less important for the market: OSes that don't need to be restarted every day, and enough RAM (and good enough memory management) to manage running a ton of open apps/windows/tabs without manually quitting and re-opening apps all the time.

Would you pay more for a Notepad that opened in 0.1s instead of 2.0s or whatever? Would you give up other features? Certainly a lot of people on HN likely would - and many probably already are running Linux (hell, I am on one of my machines as a daily driver) which hasn't had the same "ship features fast!!" pressures.

Maybe one year Apple will do another Snow Leopard, or MS will do something similar - https://www.macworld.com/article/191006/snowleopard-3.html - but right now most folks I know are enjoying the features, even the ones that we power users often find superfluous or downright annoying.