Software Is Getting Slower While Hardware Gets Faster
The 'There's no reason for software to be slow anymore' post sparked a real debate. The premise is that modern hardware is fast enough that slowness is a choice, a product of abstraction layers, bloated frameworks, and developers who don't profile. The comments broadly agreed with the diagnosis but pushed back on the cure: someone pointed out that extensibility and runtime customization often require trading speed deliberately.
The Rust Glancer thread ran parallel to this. A new Rust LSP that uses 100x less RAM than rust-analyzer is getting attention specifically because the incumbent is painfully slow on large workspaces. People had assumed that was just the cost of the tooling. Turns out it wasn't.
The pattern: slow tooling and slow software are being accepted as defaults when they don't have to be. Rust Glancer is a direct challenge to that assumption, and it's generating excitement because the bar was so low that 100x improvement was sitting there unclaimed.
So what?
Performance work is undervalued partly because it's invisible until it isn't. If your toolchain or product has slow spots that everyone has normalized, those are worth revisiting. The Rust Glancer story is a reminder that 'this is just how it works' is sometimes just 'nobody tried hard enough yet.'