![]() ![]() Because they don't actually care about performance as much as they say: they care about showing off and flexing their coding skills by making a mess. That is, despite optimizing, these are people who, despite an obsession with performance, are still treating the performance of their overall programs as an afterthought. In my own circles, it's the accusation legitimately levied against the clowns who simultaniously write macros instead of functions out of fears that the compiler could theoretically ignore a _forceinline keyword - or if you're lucky, optimizing some microbenchmark while pessimizing overall program performance - and in the next breath writing O(scary) code that'll be invoked with large enough N to demolish any savings from micro-optimizations. Premature optimization is time spent not optimizing things that actually matter. It’s more or less impossible to use a significant fraction of the CPU’s time dragging the mouse pointer around and opening and closing menus, or even opening and closing normal user apps, on a modern desktop PC, as you might very well see on the old one, so one might want to contemplate why the new PC’s UI has so much latency built in compared to the old one… ![]() ![]() I’d wager if you benchmark a good-spec twenty year old PC and any Windows 11 PC on common user tasks in the UI, the twenty year old machine will be faster while using a higher percentage of its CPU time performing the simple tasks you’re testing against. This is the sort of thing that can be tested and measured. It’s tempting to blame input and display latency on the increased amount of work an OS does versus wherever we happen to sit on the curve of Moore’s law, but that discounts the fact that the values, priorities, and abilities of the engineers and designers involved in OS development might have changed. I would venture to guess that you will not find anyone whose experience with Windows 2000 included any slowness comparable to what we see today, if they got it on a new PC of the time or if they installed it themselves on a newish PC of the time. The modern OSs at the time were sluggish too, as they were pushing the limits of their hardware. ![]()
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January 2023
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