Performance, missing and found

One of the constants in technology has been the improvement of performance. More powerful processors, faster memory, larger capacity in physically smaller disks, and faster communications have been the results of better technology.

This increase in performance is mostly mythological. We are told that our processors are more powerful, we are told that memory and network connections are faster. Yet what is our experience? What are the empirical results?

For me, word processors and spreadsheets run just as fast as they did decades ago. Operating systems load just as fast -- or just as slow.

Linux on my 2006 Apple MacBook loads slower than 1980s-vintage systems with eight-bit processors and floppy disk drives. Windows loads quickly, sort of. It displays a log-on screen and lets me enter a name and password, but then it takes at least five minutes (and sometimes an hour) updating various things.

Compilers and IDEs suffer the same fate. Each new version of Visual Studio takes longer to load. Eclipse is no escape -- it has always required a short eternity to load and edit a file. Slow performance is not limited to loading; compilation times have improved but only slightly, and not by the orders of magnitude to match the advertised improvements in hardware.

Where are the improvements? Where is the blazing speed that our hardware manufacturers promise?

I recently found that "missing" performance. It was noted in an article on the longevity of the C language, of all things. The author clearly and succinctly describes C and its place in the world. On the way, he describes the performance of one of his own C programs:

"In 1987 this code took around half an hour to run, today 0.03 seconds."

And there it is. A description of the performance improvements we should see in our systems.

The performance improvements we expect from better hardware has gone into software.

We have "invested" that performance in our operating systems, our programming languages, and user interfaces. Instead of taking all the improvements for reduced running times, we have diverted performance to new languages and to "improvements" in older languages. We invested in STL over plain old C++, Java over C++ (with or without STL), Python over Java and C#.

Why not? Its better to prevent mistakes than to have fast-running programs that crash or -- worse -- don't crash but provide incorrect results. Our processors are faster, and our programming languages do more for us. Boot times, load times, and compile times may be about the same as from decades ago, but errors are far fewer, easily detected, and much less dangerous.

Yes, there are still defects which can be exploited to hack into systems. We have not achieved perfection.

Our systems are much better with operating systems and programming languages that do the checking that the now do, and businesses and individuals can rely on computers to get the job done.

That's worth some CPU cycles.