<story><title>Did we lose our way in making efficient software?</title><url>https://rufatmammadli.medium.com/did-we-lose-our-way-in-making-efficient-software-30-mb-doc-file-vs-browser-fed12dd866a4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alerighi</author><text>The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year, yet software are more and more heavy. For example just in 2010 a Linux distribution with a DE just started did consume 100Mb of RAM, an optimized version 60Mb of RAM. I remember it perfectly. I had 2Gb of RAM and did not have even a swap partition.&lt;p&gt;Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is unusable. A computer with 8Gb of RAM is barely usable. Each new software uses Electron and consumes roughly 1Gb of RAM minimum! Browsers consume a ton of RAM, basically everything consumes an absurd amount of memory.&lt;p&gt;Not talking about Windows, I don&amp;#x27;t even know how people can use it. Every time I help my mother with the computer is so slow, and we talk about a recent PC with an i5 and 8Gb of RAM. It takes ages to startup, software takes ages to launch, it takes 1 hour if you need to do updates. How can people use these system and not complain? I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster!</text></item><item><author>stephc_int13</author><text>My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it.&lt;p&gt;Software has been freeriding on hardware improvements for a few decades, especially on web and desktop apps.&lt;p&gt;Moore&amp;#x27;s law has been a blessing and a curse.&lt;p&gt;The software you use today was written by people who learned their craft while this free-ride was still fully ongoing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flenserboy</author><text>Think also about all the finished stand-alone applications which have been discarded because of replacement APIs, or because they were written in assembly. We had near-perfect (limited feature-wise from a 3-decade view, of course) word processors, spreadsheets, and single-user databases in the late 80s&amp;#x2F;early 90s which were, except for many specific use-case additions, complete &amp;amp; only in need of regular maintenance &amp;amp; quality-of-life updates were there a way to keep them current. They were in many cases far better quality &amp;amp; documented than almost any similar applications you can get your hands on today; so many work-years done in parallel, repeated, &amp;amp; lost. If there wouldn&amp;#x27;t be software sourcing &amp;amp; document interchange issues, it would be tempting to do all my actual office-style work on a virtual mid-90s system &amp;amp; move things over to the host system when printing or sending data.&lt;p&gt;Addition: consider also how few resources these applications used, &amp;amp; how they, if they were able to run natively on contemporary systems, would have minuscule system demands compared to their present equivalents with only somewhat less capability.</text></comment>
<story><title>Did we lose our way in making efficient software?</title><url>https://rufatmammadli.medium.com/did-we-lose-our-way-in-making-efficient-software-30-mb-doc-file-vs-browser-fed12dd866a4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alerighi</author><text>The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year, yet software are more and more heavy. For example just in 2010 a Linux distribution with a DE just started did consume 100Mb of RAM, an optimized version 60Mb of RAM. I remember it perfectly. I had 2Gb of RAM and did not have even a swap partition.&lt;p&gt;Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is unusable. A computer with 8Gb of RAM is barely usable. Each new software uses Electron and consumes roughly 1Gb of RAM minimum! Browsers consume a ton of RAM, basically everything consumes an absurd amount of memory.&lt;p&gt;Not talking about Windows, I don&amp;#x27;t even know how people can use it. Every time I help my mother with the computer is so slow, and we talk about a recent PC with an i5 and 8Gb of RAM. It takes ages to startup, software takes ages to launch, it takes 1 hour if you need to do updates. How can people use these system and not complain? I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster!</text></item><item><author>stephc_int13</author><text>My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it.&lt;p&gt;Software has been freeriding on hardware improvements for a few decades, especially on web and desktop apps.&lt;p&gt;Moore&amp;#x27;s law has been a blessing and a curse.&lt;p&gt;The software you use today was written by people who learned their craft while this free-ride was still fully ongoing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wvenable</author><text>&amp;gt; The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year&lt;p&gt;I think that is some kind of fallacy.  We are doing the same things but the quality of those things is vastly different.  I collect vintage computers and I think you&amp;#x27;d be surprised how limited we were while doing the same things.  I wouldn&amp;#x27;t want to go back.&lt;p&gt;Although I will say your experience with Windows is different than mine.  On all my machines, regardless of specs, start up is fast so the point where I don&amp;#x27;t even think about it.</text></comment>