If you care about end-to-end latency, I highly recommend this talk by John Carmack: ▶ this video This talk blew my mind and made me feel like a terrible engineer. He's talking about end-to-end latency in VR, which actually has a commercial motivation because VR products with high latency will make you sick. (this obviously doesn't happen with shells and terminals!) He's talking about the buffering and filtering at every step of the way. And it's not just software -- sensors have their own controllers to do filtering, which requires buffering, before your OS kernel can even SEE the the first byte, let alone user space. On the other side, display devices and audio output devices also do nontrivial processing after you've sent them your data. It's an integrated hardware/software problem and Carmack is great at explaining it! It's a dense, long-ish talk, but worth it.
in “Terminal and shell performance” · View on HN