Geek.com is running an opinion piece on the extensive reliance of programmers today on languages like Java and .NET. The author lambastes the performance penalties that are associated with running code inside virtualised environments, like Java's and .NET's. "It increases the compute burden on the CPU because in order to do something that should only require 1 million instructions (note that on modern CPUs 1 million instructions executes in about one two-thousandths (1/2000) of a second) now takes 200 million instructions. Literally. And while 200 million instructions can execute in about 1/10th of a second, it is still that much slower." The author poses an interesting challenge at the end of his piece - a challenge most OSNews readers will have already taken on. Note: Please note that many OSNews items now have a "read more" where the article in question is discussed in more detail.
The author claims that by relying so heavily on these modern, more resource intensive programming environments, we're losing "something significant". In order to realise what that significant something is, the author poses the following challenge to his readers:
I challenge everybody out there to dig up an old copy of Windows 95 or Windows 98, and install it on your machine and note how much faster that user interface operates than the modern ones today. I also advise grabbing some older software written in the late 1990s for those operating systems and see just how fast they are today on modern equipment.
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