Thank you for providing the praise to the Windows Terminal team many of us know they deserve, allowing us to just click the thumbs-up response on GitHub.
I truly wish more modern software were capable of reaching this level of latency performance. I understand the response provided by "miniksa" at GitHub, but I don't feel satisfied by it. The maintainers of the frameworks that are described as adding so much latency should make a concerted effort to minimize that latency. We know from experience (see ASP.NET Core) that huge strides can be made in performance (both measured as throughput and latency) and that it is massively rewarding. It requires effort, but the payoffs are real.
I fear computer science is often encumbered by a corrosive culture of "good enough" with respect to performance. We have a lot of baggage and urban myths about performance, from maxims about optimization handed down from the first acolytes of computer science, to modern opinions about UX that over-emphasize simplicity, to a repertoire of clever psychological countermeasures for under-performance such as animation. It's a shame that more people don't appreciate how much more enjoyable computing is when latency is nearly zero.
Obviously orders of magnitude matter. The change from 1000ms to 100ms is more significant than a change from 100ms to 10ms. But we cannot diminish that latter change and we should not accept 100ms as good enough. Improving from 100ms to 10ms is still huge and some of us deeply appreciate it.
> I fear computer science is often encumbered by a corrosive culture of "good enough" with respect to performance. We have a lot of baggage and urban myths about performance, from maxims about optimization handed down from the first acolytes of computer science, to modern opinions about UX that over-emphasize simplicity, to a repertoire of clever psychological countermeasures for under-performance such as animation. It's a shame that more people don't appreciate how much more enjoyable computing is when latency is nearly zero.
I wouldn't blame this on computer science: it's really just a long way of saying you get what you measure. It's not that computer scientists don't care about performance, or that human factors / UX isn't an entire field, but simply that most projects don't set performance goals or prioritize them and unsurprisingly most time is spent on the things which are used to judge someone's job performance.
This is especially true when you see how many issues are shared across teams — in this case talking about Windows it's important to remember that during the Ballmer lost years, Microsoft used stack ranking to force managers to categorize a set fraction of people as low performances and reportedly those rankings heavily favored new features over maintenance improvements. In an environment like that, if the change requires coordination across teams it probably just isn't going to happen unless someone very senior makes it a business priority.
I truly wish more modern software were capable of reaching this level of latency performance. I understand the response provided by "miniksa" at GitHub, but I don't feel satisfied by it. The maintainers of the frameworks that are described as adding so much latency should make a concerted effort to minimize that latency. We know from experience (see ASP.NET Core) that huge strides can be made in performance (both measured as throughput and latency) and that it is massively rewarding. It requires effort, but the payoffs are real.
I fear computer science is often encumbered by a corrosive culture of "good enough" with respect to performance. We have a lot of baggage and urban myths about performance, from maxims about optimization handed down from the first acolytes of computer science, to modern opinions about UX that over-emphasize simplicity, to a repertoire of clever psychological countermeasures for under-performance such as animation. It's a shame that more people don't appreciate how much more enjoyable computing is when latency is nearly zero.
Obviously orders of magnitude matter. The change from 1000ms to 100ms is more significant than a change from 100ms to 10ms. But we cannot diminish that latter change and we should not accept 100ms as good enough. Improving from 100ms to 10ms is still huge and some of us deeply appreciate it.