alt Hacker News> Rarely in software does anyone ask for “fast.”
They don't explicitly ask for it, but they won't take you seriously if you don't at least pretend to be. "Fast" is assumed. Imagine if Rust had shown up, identical in every other way, but said "However, it is slower than Ruby". Nobody would have given it the time of day. The only reason it was able to gain attention was because it claimed to be "Faster than C++".
Watch HN for a while and you'll start to notice that "fast" is the only feature that is necessary to win over mindshare. It is like moths to a flame as soon as something says it is faster than what came before it.
Replies
You're taking the wrong conclusion, "Fast" is a winning differentiator only when you offer the same feature-set, but faster.
Your example says it, people will go, this is like X (meaning it does/has the same features as X), but faster. And now people will flock from X to your X+faster thing.
Which tells us nothing about if people would also move to a X+more-features, or a X+nicer-ux, or a X+cheaper, etc., without them being any faster than X or even possibly slower.
Maybe for languages, but fast is easily left behind when looking for frameworks. People want features, people want compatibility, people will use electron all over.
And yet we live in a world of (especially web) apps that are incredibly slow, in the sense that an update in response to user input might take multiple seconds.
Yes, fast wins people over. And yet we live in a world where the actual experience of every day computing is often slow as molasses.
Eh, I think the HN crowd likes fast because most tech today is unreasonably slow, when we know it could be fast.
The claim was not that Rust was faster than C++, they said it’s about as fast.
C and C++ were and are the benchmark, it would have been revolutionary to be faster and offer memory safety.
Today, in some cases Rust can be faster, in others slower.
To a first approximation HN is a group of people who have convinced themselves that it's a high quality user experience to spend 11 seconds shipping 3.8 megabytes of Javascript to a user that's connected via a poor mobile connection on a cheap dual-core phone so that user can have a 12 second session where they read 150 words and view 1 image before closing the tab.
Fast is _absolutely not_ the only thing we care about. Not even top 5. We are addicted to _convenience_.
Only in the small subset of programmers that post on HN is that the case. Most users or even most developers don't mind slow stuff or "getting into flow state" or anything like that, they just want a nice UI. I've seen professional data scientists using Github Desktop on Windows instead of just learning to type git commands for an easy 10x time save