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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

I updated a large Django project from python2.7 to 3.9 recently. Afterward, I was pleased that the app was both faster and used less than half the memory. It was somewhat surprising that the new version was so much better - most software seems to typically get only heavier over time!

So, I take this as a good sign that progress will continue.

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> most software seems to typically get only heavier over time!

It's often the case for end-user applications, but I find that most languages/runtimes tend to get better with time (and work of course !). There's a similar trend with the PHP runtime.

That rule of thumb applies to the web too. Browsers keep getting faster, websites keep getting slower.

I can't think of a language/runtime that has actually gotten slower with time. The nearest I can really point to is the uptick in compile time that happens with languages like Rust/C++ every so often. That's not really a "language is slower" problem though.

rustc's trend the last twenty releases has been that the compiler is getting faster. I guess every dependency is slowly growing in size, offsetting this in your perception? The compiler benchmarks are of course held constant to be able to compare releases.

See the perf website https://perf.rust-lang.org/dashboard.html

But isn't the Python install getting heavier.

3 packages will be installed:

  expat-2.3.0_1 
  gdbm-1.19_1 
  python-2.7.18_3

Size required on disk: 18MB

3 packages will be installed:

  expat-2.3.0_1 
  gdbm-1.19_1 
  python3-3.9.4_1

Size required on disk: 22MB

True, but that's tiny by today's standards.

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