Comment by wild_egg
8 days ago
No, the fundamental problem of these apps is that they are, for no reason, pretending they need a high powered game engine rendering loop. They don't. It's a text printout of history with some hotkeys for mode switches and such. "rendering in a single thread" should never be an issue because it should never be "rendering". It needs to stream text to stdout. That's been a solved problem for 50 years and now it takes 2GB of memory to be done poorly with broken scrollback.
Drawing to the terminal / rendering / whatever, this is all arguing semantics and very uninteresting and not insightful.
> they need a high powered game engine rendering loop
Don't believe the bs on twitter. Claude code source was leaked, there is no high powered game engine rendering loop.
> It needs to stream text to stdout
These apps are doing real work taking text that is streaming in and doing syntax highlighting, calculating diffs, and rendering markdown. If the work was split across threads they would not use anywhere close to as much power and there would not be a slow ui.
If you think this is actually nothing, prove it. Put the code up on github that shows taking a constant random stream of markdown, code, and diffs and displays it in the terminal can be done cheaply on a single thread.
The reason the computer gets hot and uses more power is because the cpu is getting close to 100% utilization.
There are two different arguments here.
> These apps are doing real work taking text that is streaming in and doing syntax highlighting, calculating diffs, and rendering markdown.
The first argument is that these are expensive operations. They are not. And the second argument is the assumption that these are desirable things for an agent system to be doing. That's a personal preference but, personally, I don't want them and would appreciate a way to disable all of that to reduce CPU use.
The argument is that doing it all on a single thread will result in high cpu utilization and that is what makes the power usage spike and the pc feel hot. Thats it.
A lot of people go “js is bad” reflexively and they are right for the wrong reasons. Its not because js (specifically v8) is slow. I have many websites and web based apps open and none fuck up my laptop as hard as claude code.
2 replies →
Stuff doable on a pentium 90, and before that, just slowly.
I wonder if those were fast enough nostalgia says yes but I bet it was dog slow if we tried today with 2026 lens.
3 replies →
The heck? It does all that rendering for a tiny fraction of the total amount of time that the TUI is running. The streaming is IO bound, there’s no way that it’s outputting nearly enough text to tax the CPU that much.
I don't think any of that seriously counts as real work.
Casey Muratori addressed this years ago with the windows terminal drama, https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm
Sorry, but nope; Golang there would be there a beast doing that in a much, much faster way. Not to mention C/C++ with NCurses.
> If you think this is actually nothing, prove it. Put the code up on github that shows taking a constant random stream of markdown, code, and diffs and displays it in the terminal can be done cheaply on a single thread.
Put up the code and prove it. We already know exactly how fast golang is in comparison to nodejs on basic numeric computations, it's roughly 40 to 50% faster.
1 reply →
[dead]