Comment by benreesman

Brendan is such a treasure to the community (buy his book it’s great).

I wasn’t doing extreme performance stuff when -fomit-frame-pointer became the norm, so maybe it was a big win for enough people to be a sane default, but even that seems dubious: “just works” profiling is how you figure out when you’re in an extreme performance scenario (if you’re an SG14 WG type, you know it and are used to all the defaults being wrong for you).

I’m deeply grateful for all the legends who have worked on libunwind, gperf stuff, perftool, DTrace, eBPF: these are the too-often-unsung heroes of software that is still fast after decades of Moore’s law free-riding.

But they’ve been fighting an uphill battle against a weird alliance of people trying to game compiler benchmarks and the really irresponsible posture that “developer time is more expensive” which is only sometimes true and never true if you care about people on low-spec gear, which is the community of users who that is already the least-resourced part of the global community.

I’m fortunate enough to have a fairly modern desktop, laptop, and phone: for me it’s merely annoying that chat applications and music players and windowing systems offer nothing new except enshittification in terms of features while needing 10-100x the resources they did a decade ago.

But for half of my career and 2/3rds of my time coding, I was on low-spec gear most of the time, and I would have been largely excluded if people didn’t care a lot about old computers back then.

I’m trying to help a couple of aspiring hackers get started right now it’s a real struggle to get their environments set up with limitations like Intel Macs and WSL2 as the Linux option (WSL2 is very cool but it’s not loved up enough by e.g. yarn projects).

If you want new hackers, you need to make things work well on older computers.

Thanks again Brendan et al!