You're not "starting Teams.exe", you are deploying a server and booting an operating system.
Seen in those terms, 9 seconds is actually pretty good.
Seen in more... sane terms, showing 1 KB of text after 9 seconds is about a billion CPU instructions needed per character.
Even React isn't all that slow. If you look at benchmarks you may be impressed by how quickly it can do some operations. It's consistently a bit slower than other frameworks, but not that far off. There are (big) React apps that are quite fast, too.
So writing performant applications with these technologies isn't impossible.
Yet a lot of apps built with them are slow. The fast ones are rare.
I don't know what it is yet (happy to be pointed somewhere), but I'm fairly convinced that these technologies have common footguns that encourage programming things in slow ways. I can imagine it being related to React's coarse-grained and easy mismanage reactivity and wonder how much of an improvement Solid is in comparison (it is also functional, but is built to always recompute as little as possible rather than saying "whatever, it's cheap", which React does).
It is absurdly slow compared to any compiled language.
> Even React isn't all that slow.
Yes, it is.
> I don't know what it is yet (happy to be pointed somewhere) [..]
It is using a web browser to show some text and images.
JIT compilation makes Javascript faster, but it is not by any metric "fast".
[0] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21&tes...
[1] https://just.billywhizz.io/blog/on-javascript-performance-01...
Just to put it in perspective: the new Team's startup time is ~9 seconds. At 7x faster, it would be slightly above 1 second, which would be OK.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but on a 3ghz CPU (3bln cycles per second), there are 27 billion cycles per character for 1kb of text. Take into account that on any non-stone-aged CPU you've got probably 4-16 cores, and can do ~4-8 SIMD ops per cycle (at full clock rate), so at the limit we're actually talking .. something like _3.4 TOPS PER BYTE_ ..
SIMD is a little unfair, because virtually none of what an app like Teams does is amenable to vectorisation. If we allow SIMD, then we have to allow the GPU, and then we're talking about an entire different order of magnitude.
A decent last-gen GPU has something like 30 teraflops, so about 265 billion instructions per displayed character!
> SIMD is a little unfair
Yeah .. I agree, but I wanted to illustrate (to your point) just how much juice modern chips have.
But yeah, it is incredible when stuff used to load on single core 500 MHz CPUs.
Or that I had a full graphical desktop on a 20 MHz CPU once. And it really wasn't that different? Launcher of apps at the bottom, even, despite being a completely different OS…
Sounds about right and, actually, is quite a feat.
I just wonder how they went from "build a chat app with some filesharing built in" to "include everything and the kitchen sink and oh, in your own universe" kinda thing...