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Isn't it even worse now? The faster computers get, the more that software-induced bottlenecks hurt.
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I could see just powering through because modern hardware is fast enough to do so being an option.

Adding 20% to a 10 second operation is a lot longer on a wall clock than adding 20% to a 1 second operation.

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What even is a 20% delta in performance? Like a five year old difference in hardware design.

If I could get a micro kernel with a better security profile than Linux, that doesn’t sound so bad. I could easily be using a ten year old chip for my day to day browsing and probably wouldn’t notice.

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If anything, Mach style IPC has gotten worse because of the greater overhead if kernel/user transitions. Spectre really did a number on context switching overhead.
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I'm not a Hurd contributor ( or any OS kernel / library ).

I'm not sure this holds today. One example I can see is related to crypto. We used to have specific hardware for computing cryptography functions but it's now handled directly in standard hardware and the software has not evolved ( but it's been faster and faster to compute checksum functions )

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I mean, every major arch has crypto specific acceleration instructions.
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