alt Hacker NewsThe tradeoff isn’t dev job easy vs better performance. The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about instead of unobservably better performance.
Replies
> instead of unobservably better performance
That's... quite the choice of words there
The problem Is when the performance problems becomes observable. Only after a specific scenario like low power mode for example
> instead of unobservably better performance.
It's imperceptible because the hardware has gotten so much faster. This would be like a top fuel dragster the size of a freight train.
The engine is incredibly powerful but the overall performance is hindered by the size of the overall vehicle not being optimized around it.
> work on things users care about
Apparently what users care about is having more whitespace around everything.
[dead]
Which is such a capitalist lens to look at things through. Optimizing for a very small window of reality.
It's the same sort of optimization that drives behaviors where corporations feel no need to contribute to open-source projects. The same projects that enabled those very corporations to exist.
Oh, you mean those shitty Web UI frameworks with worse performance on modern hardware than native GUI programs from 1995?
Back then devs were not taking shortcuts, it was the C API or bust, and it very much shows how far we have regressed.