Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Mythbusters 4981 days ago
>> The problem with Windows "apps" is that they are made inefficient and un-optimized by default

Very knowledgeable opinion sir. This is indeed true. Us as windows developers are required to add a sleep statement every few lines of code so as it not make it appear responsive.
6 comments
pestaa 4981 days ago
I'm sure that comment means that developers do not put much effort into optimizing their Windows apps, not that they make them resource-intensive on purpose. No need to twist his words around.
link
seabee 4981 days ago
The point is that you can get away with inefficient code on desktop Windows, which is invariably caused by your favourite application framework rather than glib developers (not) inserting sleep calls everywhere.
link
mtgx 4980 days ago
That's not what I meant of course. What I meant is that apps on Windows tend to be a lot more "bloated"/full of features/graphics compared to the much leaner mobile apps.

Also, most devs probably build for the average performance, so say something like an old Core 2 Duo laptop, and if their app there has a 10% CPU utilization, it might have 30% CPU utilization on Atom, or more, which means on ARM chips, especially the mid-end to low-end ones, the same app will use the CPU a lot more. Apps designed for mobile are meant to use 5-10% of those ARM CPU's from day one.

link
CountSessine 4981 days ago
Very knowledgeable opinion sir. This is indeed true. Us as windows developers are required to add a sleep statement every few lines of code so as it not make it appear responsive.

A sleep() statement?! Novice! That won't even busy-wait! I like to loop around for a few thousand times writing nonsense to dummy variables. I earned those time slices - no way am I going to just give them back to the OS scheduler.

link
Moto7451 4981 days ago
Haha, perhaps you've implemented this technique before:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Speedup-Loop.aspx

link
rbanffy 4981 days ago
A high-end i7 machine with 16 GB of RAM and an SSD is not rare between Windows developers.

OTOH, I do a lot of Linux development on an Atom netbook.

link
GrammarSpelling 4981 days ago
"We as Windows developers..."
link