alt Hacker NewsWhile the author says that much of it can be attributed to the layers of software in between to make it more accessible to people, in my experience most cases are about people being lazy in their developing of applications.
For example, there was a case of how Claude Code uses React to figure out what to render in the terminal and that in itself causes latency and its devs lament how they have "only" 16.7 ms to achieve 60 FPS. On a terminal. That can do way more than that since its inception. Primeagen shows an example [0] of how even the most terminal change filled applications run much faster such that there is no need to diff anything, just display the new change!
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It makes me wish more graphics programmers would jump over to application development - 16.7ms is a huge amount of time for them, and 60 frames per second is such a low target. 144 or bust.
Yeah, I think a lot of this can be attributed to institutional and infrastructural inertia, abstraction debt, second+-order ignorance, and narrowing of specialty. People now building these things are probably good enough at React etc. to do stuff that needs to be done with it almost anywhere, but their focus needs to be ML.
The people that could make terminal stuff super fast at low level are retired on an island, dead, or don't have the other specialties required by companies like this, and users don't care as much about 16.7ms on a terminal when the thing is building their app 10x faster so the trade off is obvious.
This sounds like how curses did things, a 1980 technology.
On the other hand, if the guy in the video ran his app over a remote connection with limited bandwidth, diffing would probably perform better. I have a one Gbps google fiber connection to my job but at times my vpn bandwidth can choke down to a couple hundred kbps and sometimes worse.