I think the issue isn't even individual developers, it's indeed the runtime itself. Anything you build on top of it is laggy.
Take my simple example of reading a file, processing it in memory, writing output. A process that should be instant in almost any case.
An implementation of such process that is commonly used in the front-end world would be CSS compilation, where a SCSS file (which is 90% CSS) is compiled into normal CSS output. The computation being pretty simple, it's all in-memory and some reshuffling of values.
In terms of what is actually happening (if we take the shortest path to solve the problem), this process should be instant. Not only that, it can probably handle a 1,000 of such files per second.
Instead, just a handful of files takes multiple seconds. Possibly a thousand times slower than the shortest path. Because that process is a node package with dependencies 17 layers deep running an interpreted language. Worse, the main package requires a Ruby runtime (no longer true for this example, but it was), which then loads a gem and then finally is ready to discover alien life, or...do simple string manipulation.
To appreciate the absurdity of this level of waste, I'd compare it to bringing the full force of the US army in order to kill a mosquito.
It's in end user apps too, and spreading. Desktop apps like Spotify, parts of Photoshop, parts of Office365...all rewritten in Electron, React, etc.
I can understand the perspective of the lonesome developer needing productivity. What I cannot understand is that the core layers are so poor. It means that millions of developers are building millions of apps on this poor foundation. It's a planetary level of waste.
Hmm, I recently built a site on Zola, and rebuilding the whole blog (including a theme with around 10 files of Sass) compiles in a few dozen milliseconds, and around 1 second on a 15 year old Core 2 Duo. But then again this is compiled Rust camping into libsass, which (despite Rust's dependency auditing nightmare) compiles to low-overhead executables. And apparently libsass is now deprecated for Dart Sass which relies on JS or the Dart VM.
Take my simple example of reading a file, processing it in memory, writing output. A process that should be instant in almost any case.
An implementation of such process that is commonly used in the front-end world would be CSS compilation, where a SCSS file (which is 90% CSS) is compiled into normal CSS output. The computation being pretty simple, it's all in-memory and some reshuffling of values.
In terms of what is actually happening (if we take the shortest path to solve the problem), this process should be instant. Not only that, it can probably handle a 1,000 of such files per second.
Instead, just a handful of files takes multiple seconds. Possibly a thousand times slower than the shortest path. Because that process is a node package with dependencies 17 layers deep running an interpreted language. Worse, the main package requires a Ruby runtime (no longer true for this example, but it was), which then loads a gem and then finally is ready to discover alien life, or...do simple string manipulation.
To appreciate the absurdity of this level of waste, I'd compare it to bringing the full force of the US army in order to kill a mosquito.
It's in end user apps too, and spreading. Desktop apps like Spotify, parts of Photoshop, parts of Office365...all rewritten in Electron, React, etc.
I can understand the perspective of the lonesome developer needing productivity. What I cannot understand is that the core layers are so poor. It means that millions of developers are building millions of apps on this poor foundation. It's a planetary level of waste.