While I don't doubt that there is some validity to this, but this is really not why modern code is slow.
Story time: About 20 years ago I was working as a Software Developer and as my company were part of the Microsoft partner's network we received free tickets to a 2-day workshop on there brand new thing that they said would change software development forever... They were calling it ".NET". So one of my coworkers and I traveled to this event and spent 3 days in a conference hall with 20 other developers from around the country and they gave us a crash course in .NET application development.
As a developer my thoughts on .NET were mixed. It was SUPER easy to use. Nearly everything could be done dragging and dropping objects and modifying parameters in the UI. It was easy... This was Microsoft making software development accessible to people who were not really software developers. Front-end UI engineer could suddenly be productive on the back end. A script kiddie could suddenly make a real application.
And it preformed like shit. I made a hello world app that was a single .NET form with a few text labels and a text field that populated with the string "Hello World!" and when I ran it it took 20MB of memory. Even in the early '00s that was not a lot of memory, but this app was doing literally nothing. It was clear that the .NET framework was an absolute performance pig.
Several of us challenged the Microsoft instructors on this. Their response? "Yeah we know it performs poorly compared to nice tight hand-written code... This is the price you pay for making it so easy to develop in the framework. And we have decided that performance is literally our last concern. Every year CPUs double in speed. Our philosophy is that we are writing the development tools for the next 10 years. What looks like a 'performance hog' today will be just a drop in the bucket tomorrow."
So there you have it folks. Microsoft lead the way but the entire industry followed. Modern software performs so slowly because software developers stopped caring once computers became fast. Software developers prioritized things that make their lives easier.
Glowbright 1 points 10 months ago
While I don't doubt that there is some validity to this, but this is really not why modern code is slow.
Story time:
About 20 years ago I was working as a Software Developer and as my company were part of the Microsoft partner's network we received free tickets to a 2-day workshop on there brand new thing that they said would change software development forever... They were calling it ".NET". So one of my coworkers and I traveled to this event and spent 3 days in a conference hall with 20 other developers from around the country and they gave us a crash course in .NET application development.
As a developer my thoughts on .NET were mixed. It was SUPER easy to use. Nearly everything could be done dragging and dropping objects and modifying parameters in the UI. It was easy... This was Microsoft making software development accessible to people who were not really software developers. Front-end UI engineer could suddenly be productive on the back end. A script kiddie could suddenly make a real application.
And it preformed like shit. I made a hello world app that was a single .NET form with a few text labels and a text field that populated with the string "Hello World!" and when I ran it it took 20MB of memory. Even in the early '00s that was not a lot of memory, but this app was doing literally nothing. It was clear that the .NET framework was an absolute performance pig.
Several of us challenged the Microsoft instructors on this. Their response? "Yeah we know it performs poorly compared to nice tight hand-written code... This is the price you pay for making it so easy to develop in the framework. And we have decided that performance is literally our last concern. Every year CPUs double in speed. Our philosophy is that we are writing the development tools for the next 10 years. What looks like a 'performance hog' today will be just a drop in the bucket tomorrow."
So there you have it folks. Microsoft lead the way but the entire industry followed. Modern software performs so slowly because software developers stopped caring once computers became fast. Software developers prioritized things that make their lives easier.