021 - the tortoise and the hare - building faster with low level programming | eno writer
I am deriving a lot of personal satisfaction from writing eno from scratch using a low level programming language. At the same time, I can't ignore the reality that I spend a lot of time writing code to do things that are trivially accomplished in higher level programming environments.
My last company's software was written to run in a web browser. This meant it could leverage languages that are interpreted by the browser like HTML, CSS and Javascript to accomplish things very quickly. Displaying a word on a web browser is as simple as typing it into an HTML file and loading it. With eno, I spent several weeks writing low level code to load fonts, rasterize glyphs, manage a font atlas and draw rectangles on the GPU before I could display a single letter on the screen. I could have accomplished a lot with those weeks if I had been building in a web browser instead.
Obviously, I am building slower with a low level language than I would with a high level one. However, there's an argument to be made that it might be faster in the long term: it could be like the tortoise and the hare.
