[ChuckNorris89]

>your program was very close to hardware with very little in between if not running completely free from OS abstractions

This! It also meant that it was very very easy for any program or misbehaving driver to completely crash your system. Not to mention all the security implications of every app having direct hardware access.

[Dylan16807]

But when I go look at my text editor being slow, I can see that the amount of CPU time spent dealing with the kernel is less than a tenth of it. So that's not the reason.

[tashbarg]

That's not how latency or responsiveness works.

Dan Luu did cool experiments with input lag (https://danluu.com/input-lag/).

[Dylan16807]

It's a much better estimate than hand waving about memory isolation.

If we want to talk about how things work directly, my program can get things to the GPU in far less than a millisecond. The safety layers are not the problem.