this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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There’s still plenty of inefficiencies to criticize.
Of course there is lots to criticize. And it does not get worse than electron. But it is pretty easy to run a fairly lean desktop in 2025. And bloated applications are not a new invention.
I guess we can talk about the “rise” of interpreted languages. As long as we ignore that the Lingua Franca of the 8 bit era was BASiC I guess. Or Logo! We also have to ignore hugely popular languages in their era like Perl 5, Lisp, TCL, Scheme, and PHP. How about all those Bash scripts? And Javascript is less interpreted than it used to be as you say. I assume you mean Python but it is over 30 years old and PyPy is a thing. Most newer languages are JIT or fully compiled. Rust, Go, Swift, Carbon, and Zig are all compiled languages. Kotlin, Gleam, and Elixir are JIT. What are all the new interpreted languages? If anything, I would say the trend is towards performance and efficiency.
JavaScript works against his point in a big way. Javascript was released 30 years ago and yet javascript code runs dramatically faster (on the same hardware) in a modern web browser than it will on one from back then. JavaScript engines are VERY heavily optimized and browser devs will move mountains for another percent or two. And WASM is even faster.
You can build Rust applications on Windows 95 and they are faster than C++ was back then. Not everyone has given up on performance.
Modern code can be much more parallel and asynchronous (faster). And there is a strong recent focus on memory safety and efficiency.
Networking and file systems are both much faster and more efficient than they used to be.
And of course modern processors are not just faster but have many more performance focussed instructions (SIMD, AVX, vector extensions, etc). And we have hardware acceleration for media codecs and of course virtualization which speed up applications dramatically. And technologies like hypervisor clusters and containers can lead to significantly better resource utilization in practice.
Anyway, his point is obvious and of course true to an extent. Not nearly to extent he claims though.