Comment by mjr00
3 days ago
> You are comparing applications with wildly different features and UI. That's neither an argument for nor against performance as an important quality metric.
I never said performance wasn't an important quality metric, just that it's not the only quality metric. If a slow program has the features I need and a fast program doesn't, the slow program is going to be "higher quality" in my mind.
> How fast you can compile, start and execute some particular code matters. The experience of using a program that performs well if you use it daily matters.
Like any other feature, whether or not performance is important depends on the user and context. Chrome being faster than IE8 at general browsing (rendering pages, opening tabs) was very noticeable. uv/ruff being faster than pip/poetry is important because of how the tools integrate into performance-sensitive development workflows. Does Slack taking 5-10 seconds to load on startup matter? -- to me not really, because I have it come up on boot and forget about it until my next system update forced reboot. Do I use LibreOffice or Word and Excel, even though LibreOffice is faster? -- I use Word/Excel because I've run into annoying compatibility issues enough times with LO to not bother. LibreOffice could reduce their startup and file load times to 10 picoseconds and I would still use MS Office, because I just want my damn documents to keep the same formatting my colleagues using MS Office set on their Windows computers.
Now of course I would love the best of all worlds; programs to be fast and have all the functionality I want! In reality, though, companies can't afford to build every feature, performance included, and need to pick and choose what's important.
> If a slow program has the features I need and a fast program doesn't, the slow program is going to be "higher quality" in my mind.
That’s irrelevant here, the fully featured product can also be fast. The overwhelming majority of software is slow because the company simply doesn’t care about efficiency. Google actively penalized slow websites and many companies still didn’t make it a priority.
> That’s irrelevant here, the fully featured product can also be fast.
So why is it so rarely the case? If it's so simple, why hasn't anyone recognized that Teams, Zoom, etc are all bloated and slow and made a hyper-optimized, feature-complete competitor, dominating the market?
Software costs money to build, and performance optimization doesn't come for free.
> The overwhelming majority of software is slow because the company simply doesn’t care about efficiency.
Don't care about efficiency at all, or don't consider it as important as other features and functionality?
> Software costs money to build, and performance optimization doesn't come for free.
Neither do caching, operational/architectural overhead, slow builds and all the hoops we jump through in order to satisfy stylistic choices. All of this stuff introduces complexity and often demands specialized expertise on top.
And it's typically not about optimization, but about not doing things that you don't necessarily have to do. A little bit of frugality goes a long way. Often leading to simpler code and fewer dependencies.
The hardware people are (actually) optimizing, trying hard to make computers fast, to a degree that it introduces vulnerabilities (like the apple CPU cache prefetching memory from arrays of pointers, which opened it up for timing attacks, or the branch prediction vulnerability on intel chips). Meanwhile we software people are piling more and more stuff into programs that aren't needed, from software patterns/paradigms to unnecessary dependencies etc.
There's also the issue of programs feeling entitled to resources. When I'm running a video game or a data migration, I obviously want to give it as many resources as possible. But it shouldn't be necessary to provide gigabytes of memory for utility programs and operative applications.
Not being free upfront isn’t the same thing as expensive.
Zoom’s got 7,412 employees a small team of say 7 employees could make a noticeable difference here and the investment wouldn’t disappear, it would help drive further profits.
> Don't care about efficiency at all
Doesn’t care beyond basic functionality. Obviously they care if something takes an hour to load, but rarely do you see considerations for people running on lower hardware than the kind of machines you see at a major software company etc.
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