The simplest logic tells us that as computers become more powerful, applications should increase their average speed. However, there are many tasks that apparently did not increase their performance. That is to say, it gives us the feeling that by doing them they do not work better than with our previous PC. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as Wirth’s law. Why does it happen?
In computing, there is the so-called Moore’s Law, which refers to the complexity of chips, not their speed. Amdahl’s Law also existed for a long time, until the mid-2000s when the move to multi-core chips had to be made. All are laws, they are based on hardware, however, the task of hardware is to run software and in terms of performance, poor program practices can ruin performance increases.
What is Wirth’s Law and how does it affect my PC’s performance?
As hardware resources became nearly infinite, the need to write good code was lost. The important thing is not that a program works, but rather that it does so using as few hardware resources as possible. Either memory size or processor power. The problem stems from the fact that as hardware performance increases, problems that were once solved with good programming discipline are increasingly being ignored and this is a problem that does not only affect PCs or mobile phones.
Thus, we end up with the problem that applications that should consume part of the resources they spend end up being like cookies for the famous blue monster of Sesame Street. Now wellthe name of the law that we owe to Niklaus Wirthwho in February 1995 wrote an article entitled A Plea for Lean Software which could be translated as “a petition for cleaner software”.
Let’s say that with each new iteration, bad practices mean that as the processing capacity of the heaviest and least efficient processors increases, the programs are made. Take Microsoft Word for example, 99% of people still use it as they did 20 years ago. However, the size of the application increased enormously and the PCs of the time could not run the new version well.
Is it something inevitable?
Not really, you just need to run older versions of the programs to gain performance. As silly as it may sound, sometimes it’s better to pull older versions through Abandonware to perform certain tasks than not using the newer versions. And Wirth’s law is not only given in common applications. We’ve seen how some re-releases of games that are remastered versions of games from yesteryear end up performing poorly for newer hardware.
So the flaw that some things don’t seem to go faster isn’t that PCs haven’t suddenly slowed down or given us a performance boost. Blame it on the software which has ceased to optimize itself and with it has become less efficient. Many companies have stopped having quality departments, that is, people who check that the code is well written and optimized. A good app not only works, it does so using as few resources as possible.
And why is this happening? Due to the fact that deadlines and deliveries are imposed which depend on commercial services. After all, software can be updated and patched. The problem is that many apps that we think work well actually work worse than they should.
