Efficient music players remain elusive
The dirty secret in software development: most think they how to write efficient software when they need to, but very few can.<p>Sometimes the excuse is that cpu and memory are cheap as if resources aren't under constant pressure from the hundreds of processes that all pretend they are the only one on the machine.<p>Many also don't know how to draw simple, low-overhead abstraction boundaries. Everybody wants to make the most generic code planning for things that will never happen or at least not in the way they think. You can't call out most people on this because this one piece of code they are working on is always the exception.<p>And most developers don't know how to optimize as they write code. They often don't understand the problem or have enough mechanical sympathy to understand what code you should probably be careful with and should be made quick to start off with. They probably don't understand the cache system enough to know why that linked hash table is probably the wrong data structure. Hash means fast to them, and to them this is all premature optimization even when the correct solution is probably no more difficult than what they are doing. Calling something premature optimization is often used to shut down discussion of how their code can be improved.<p>The field is too in love with horribly inefficient frameworks. Writing network code and protocols is now considered too low level for people. Many are too caught up it what is tech-cool. They're like the holistic medicine practitioners of software and they don't even know it.