alt Hacker NewsGiven development speed is way up, I'd be interested to see what a from-basic-principles simple and efficient OS and programming system might look like. Or people trying radically different versions of efficiency and simplicity, like an OS that uses an existing battle-tested sandboxed execution environment like v8 for userspace safety/isolation.
Fundamentally, many inefficiencies were justified for developer productivity, and I'm not sure that makes sense anymore, and the cost of larger projects with clear abstraction boundaries has plummetted.
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>Fundamentally, many inefficiencies were justified for developer productivity, and I'm not sure that makes sense anymore
Having lived through this period, I would disagree, quite the opposite we tended to develop in C and assembly specifically for runtime efficiency because we had to.
For developer productivity you could opt for Lisp or SmallTalk or some such, which ran much slower until high quality compilers for these became available, and even then your target machine might only have a C compiler.
This is the thing - when the cost of iterating and grinding compiler warnings drops to virtually 0, what new paradigms might we invent to exploit that? Rust gives us an inkling of an idea of what might be possible, but that still predates LLMs and thus still makes concession for human ergonomics. What are structures, guardrails, and patterns, that our OSs, frameworks, and toolchains can put in place, which would result in whole classes of problems going away completely, at the expense of massively increased (but mechanical, and easily automatable with a prompt) developer effort?
The next few years are going to be fun.
I think you have that backwards.
It's the lack of clear abstraction boundaries that causes decreased developer productivity.
A code generator will not save you from Conway's law.