Adage made by Niklaus Wirth in 1995:
«Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster»
- Do you think it’s actually true?
- How should you measure ‘speed’ of software? By CPU cycles or rather by time you need to complete some task?
- What about software that is actually getting faster and leaner (measured by CPU cycles and MB of RAM) and more responsive with new versions, like Firefox 3.0 compared with 2.0, Linux 2.6 compared with 2.4, Ruby 1.9 compared to 1.8. Or completely new software that is order of magnitude faster then old stuff (like Google’s V8 Engine)? Doesn’t it negate that law?
Yes I think it is true.
How do I measure the speed of software? Well time to solve tasks is a relevant indicator. For me as a user of software I do not care whether there are 2 or 16 cores in my machine. I want my OS to boot fast, my programs to start fast and I absolutely do not want to wait for simple things like opening files to be done. A software has to just feel fast. So .. when booting Windows Vista there is no fast software I am watching.
Software / Frameworks often improve their performance. That’s great but these are mostly minor changes. The exception proves the rule 🙂
In my opinion it is all about feeling. And it feels like computers have been faster years ago. Of course I couldn’t run the current games and software on those old machines. But they were just faster 🙂