Electron.

At a guess, by something in the UI framework turning an O(n) task into an O(n^2) task. Seen that happen in person, the iPhone app was taking 20 minutes(!) to start up in some conditions, the developer responsible insisted the code couldn't possibly be improved, the next day I'd found the un-necessary O(n^2) op and reduced that to a few hundred milliseconds.

The over-abstraction of current programming is, I think, a mistake — I can see why the approach in React and SwiftUI is tempting, why people want to write code that way, but I think it puts too much into magic black-boxes. If you change your thinking just a bit, the older ways of writing UI are not that difficult, and much more performant.

I have a bunch of other related opinions about e.g. why VIPER is slightly worse than an entire pantheon of god classes combined with a thousand lines inside an if-block: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-21.31.19.html

I remember using phpBB back in the late 2000's, viewing a page that had at least 100 animated emoticons on it.

It would slow IE6 down to a halt. But then I tried Chrome or Firefox (I forget which one) and it didn't even blink showing the same page. I even remember reading some developer posts about things like that at the time.

Problem for id is that you have no sane way of profiling the DOS port on NeXT.

I did game engine dev professionally in 1994 (and non-professionally before that). We profiled both time and memory use, using GCC and gprof for function-level profiling, recording memory allocation statistics by type and pool (and measuring allocation time), microbenchmarking the time spent sending commands to blitters and coprocessors, visually measuring the time in different phases of the frame rendering loop to 10-100 microsecond granularity by toggling border or palette registers, measuring time spent sorting display lists, time in collision detection, etc.

You might regard most of those as not what you mean by profiling, but the GCC/gprof stuff certainly counts, as it provides a detailed profile after a run, showing hot functions and call stacks to investigate.

It's true that most of the time, we just changed the code, ran the game again and just looked at the frame rate or even just how fluid it felt, though :-)

While 486 AGI stalls were trivial, especially Pentium changed the game with its U and V pipes. You could no longer trivially eyeball what code is faster. Profiling was a must.

Heck, I even "profiled" my C64 routines in the eighties by changing the border color. You could clearly visually see how long your code takes to execute.

I don't recall whether there were any security-minded limits you could put on what was shared, but for a team that was meant to share everything, it was pretty handy.

Later I saw some Citrix setups which would load the applications from the server. That also worked pretty OK.

With Windows you definitely had all the options to make this work in the late 90s.

Anyone remember Novell NetWare?

made my day :)

you did have networking? waw

not here.. that's why Floppy-net was something.. as well as bus-304-net (like, write a floppy, hop on bus 304, go to other campus)

The 486SX was fully 32-bit (unlike the SLC and 386SX) and the 486DX had the integrated FPU, and the 487 was a drop in 486DX which disabled the 486SX

The 386SX had a 16 bit external bus interface so it could work with 286 chipsets. The DX processors had a full 32 bit bus and correspondingly better throughput. The 386 never included an integrated FPU, you had to add a separate co-processor for that.

This is not the case with double buffering. There can be a case, if the CPU renders fast enough, where it just finished rendering to the current target, but the previous target is still being sent to the CRT. In that case the CPU need to block on VBL.

Let's stick with photography. Can someone who knows what they're doing get great results with cheap equipment? Yes, in many situations. Is it WAY easier with the right gear? Absolutely. Finding the right balance is tricky - no, you don't need a flagship body and lens to get started, but having a flagship or pro-grade body/lens from 1-3 generations ago can be huge.

I shoot Nikon, not Sony, but going from a consumer D50 body to a Pro D300 body was huge just in terms of ergonomics - more buttons to allow me to quickly adjust things without having to pull the camera from my eye and fumble through menus.

In the current generation, I finally moved to Mirrorless with a Z6ii which blew my mind and enabled so many more things - no, I wasn't "getting the full use" out of it and yes, I got some great shots with my old DSLR gear, but it made so many things so much easier that it made shooting fun and got me to carry the camera and take photos every day, which has been the biggest factor in improving my skills. Within the last few months I splurged and upgraded to a current-gen flagship (Z8) which amazed me once again - the Z6ii was more camera than I could fully exploit, but the Z8's ergonomics are just incredible - so many buttons, most of them remappable, allowing me to truly develop an instinctive way of shooting and allowing the equipment to get out of my way.

It's important to try to avoid loving gear more than loving the activity, but that doesn't mean that higher-end gear is "wasted on" amateurs.

I have never seen it called Doliprane or Dafalgan here only ever Paracetamol which is the generic name.

Show me a photo of that beauty.

+1 on Andrew Kensler's awesomeness. After I published these article, he took the time to send me a package with Pixar goodies. Deeply moving gesture.