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I don’t disagree with this. Software’s performance enshittification is maybe non intentional per-se, but it’s pretty obvious that devs don’t think they need to optimize until it’s confirmed that their software is insufferably slow. And I mean their software has to be so slow that it loses them customers in droves.

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LeFrog@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

devs

More like managers

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- JayDee@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  True, though it’s a mix of culpability. We wouldn’t be in this situation if devs quit over poor managerial decisions. Devs keep their heads down and do the dirty work, so they’re also culpable in these trends. They don’t deserve defending, they deserve a wakeup call.
  
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  - sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    You got it.
    
    Its time to stop acting like all game devs are somehow totally free of responsibility from all this.
    
    I say this as a person who at least used to personally know game devs, mod devs, and I have been modding (as in making the mods) games since the mid 00’s.
    
    Yes, of course management is shitheads.
    
    But there are many game devs who don’t whore themselves out to corpos they know will do this dumb shit.
    
    There are many indie or AA or other devs who build games that are a little bit less graphically fancy, but run 3x as fast.
    
    Go right now and play Titanfall 2, built on a fork of the Portal 2 Source Engine variant, and tell me that any modern, comparable game really looks like it is so much more impressive it needs all the horsepower and cost that goes into getting it to run at the same resolution and framerate.
    
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boonhet@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
When possible, use open source software that isn’t developed by commercial entities (yes that also disqualifies all real browsers available - maybe Ladybird will be different? But then the specs themselves for the web are so bloated it takes too long to implement them and you have to cut corners).

Thing with for-profit development is that micro-optimizations don’t make fiscal sense. Say it takes 10 seconds for an API call. That’s too long if it’s supposed to be an interactive website! You spend 4 hours getting 9 seconds off by improving multiple problematic methods. Now the next 900 milliseconds? Maybe that’ll take you 10 hours. Fun? Absolutely, I live for that shit. But in most commercial environments this would be considered a waste of time because I could spend it doing something more impactful.

And anything being twice as fast or memory efficient is usually not noticeable. If you’re going to optimize something, it should be at least an order of magnitude. Therefore everything but low hanging fruits often gets ignored. Usually it’s a case of reconsidering your data structures to be able to use better algorithms, or reconsidering the business requirements to get rid of some processing that could be avoided. The former requires architectural insight not every developer has, plus agreement among devs. The latter may require outright navigating office politics to get product team to drop some low business impact feature requirement that has high impact on performance.

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- Jumuta@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  you really need people that want to make good software to get good software, i only use foss for the same reason
  
  idk if ladybird will get better performance than the others though, i honestly think it’s a web framework issue more than a browser issue, barebones lightweight browsers like netsurf are perfectly usable on well made sites like the arch wiki
  
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  - boonhet@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I think everyone wants to make good software, except upper level management that only cares about the money. But in some companies, your boss or your boss’s boss has some kind of feature roadmap and they get their asses chewed off if that is not met.
    
    I honestly think most people WANT to do good work. But ain’t nobody going to work overtime to deliver a better product with unreasonable timelines. Not unless there’s a heavy stock option plan and you’re in a startup where your input actually changes things.
    
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stewi1914@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Sometimes optimizing code comes at the cost of extra time and effort, but I often see projects bury themselves with pointless complexity that slows both development and execution down.

If developers didn’t have this stupid idea that they need to be typing to be productive, we could save a lot of pain. Sure you might see a solution to a problem that e.g. uses a sorting algorithm, and you can pretty quickly pull a perfectly fine sorting algorithm out your ass in a minute, but what if sorting is completely unnecessary?

Questions like “can I remove the need for sorting” are never asked, and instead we waste time answering questions like “what is the fastest sorting algorithm”.

Sometimes spending an entire day staring into the screen without writing any code is exactly what’s needed to save time and produce a better solution.

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