Comment by maccard

In my defence, I never said it was efficient! Games always suck for battery because they’re constantly rendering.

> I would expect, actually, that it would be faster (all available cores get used).

And I think this assumption is what's killing us. Async != parallel for a start, and parallel IO is not guaranteed to be fast.

If you write a function:

    async Task<ImageFile> LoadFile(string path)
    {
        var f = await load_file(path);
        return new ImageFile(f);
    }

And someone comes along and makes it into a batch operation;

    async Task<List<ImageFile>> LoadFiles(List<string> paths)
    {
        var results = new List<ImageFile>();
        foreach(var path in paths) {
            var f = await load_file(path);
            results.Add(ImageFile(f));
        }
        return results;
    }

and provides it with 2 files instead of 1, you won't notice it. Over time 2 becomes 10, and 10 becomes 500. You're now at the mercy of whatever is running your tasks. If you yield alongside await [0] in an event loop, you introduce a loop iteration of latency in proceeding, meaning you've now introduced 500 loops of latency.

In case you say "but that's bad code", well yes, it is. But it's also very common. When I was reading for this reply, I found this stackoverflow [0] post that has exactly this problem.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5061761/is-it-possible-t...

Just FWIW, that is what PC Pro magazine's benchmark suite did in the early 1990s.

It ran (5-10x) a set of scripted operations in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, PhotoShop, and WinZip, on large files, and that was the basis of of the benchmark score.

I ported the benchmark suite from 16-bit Windows to 32-bit Windows.

This is literally what I said:

> The author mentions rewriting core applications in C# on windows but I don’t think this is the problem. Write a simple hello world app in c#, compile it and see how long it takes to run vs a rust app or a python script - it’s almost native <...>

> My gut instinct is an adjustment to everything being asynchronous, combined <...> with frameworks that introduce latency, context switching, and are thin wrappers that spend most of our time FFI’ing things to native languages, and then deploy them in non perfect conditions you get the mess we’re in now.