When did 16GB RAM become like basically nothing? Isn't software meant to be getting more efficient?
Discussion
Most software developers tend to use all available resources. So while hardware resources get more and more, software uses it less and less efficiently.
This has been my observation too, but it's a shame given we have more tools than ever that make efficient software development accessible. E.g. you don't need to learn C anymore, you can make fast efficient lightweight software with Go instead.
Yeah, but developing efficient code is hard. And needs time. And what most developers don't get enough is time. 🤷 At least that's my experience
That's fair don't get me wrong but Go is muuuuuch easier than the machine code or C they used to be stuck with and requires no manual garbage collection for example... so much stuff modern languages do automatically you had to do from scratch in C.
Ain't this is without even mentioning LLMs... I know for a fact many devs are writing great chunks of their code with ChatGPT. GPT-4 in particular is very good at it.
Garbage collection is a good example. Automatic garbage collection is always a tradeoff between efficiency and use of resources, i.e. cpu time and memory usage. It can only do educated guess when it might be the best time to clean up memory, so it might do it even when there are better things to do for your cpu or it might not clean up at all of you still keep a reference to am object somewhere without you noticing.
What high level languages really brought us is efficiency in development time (you can develop complex code much faster than in the past), but not really in resource usage.
This varies highly with the language. It's absolutely a fair criticism of Python for example. But I use Go as my example precisely because of how efficient it is despite being almost just as easy to code.
Yep
also, many young dev make use of tons of huge frameworks and hundreds of dependencies even for the smallest task.
they say it is easier and faster but the actual truth is that they don't know what they are doing
10000% can attest to this.
When I was ten I could code a fully functional website by hand from scratch.
Right now I have no idea where to even start... why are there a billion "frameworks" for HTML and JS?
Don't get me wrong I do like things like static site generators because they have a real use case and make things easier.
But all this framework bullshit just gives me a headache.
Software development in most areas (e.g. Windows, games) did not focus on using resources more efficiently because new Windows versions and games drive hardware sales. There is little incentive for developers. The generational improvements in speed, graphics etc. have become minimal. E.g. Pcie 3.0 vs. 4.0 SSD's are not meaningfully slower in day to day use.
I understand this argument for Apple, but less so for Microsoft. The revenue they get from OEM Windows licenses is peanuts whereas prior to W10 they got away with charging min $100 for consumer software updates.
Surely this gives them incentive to keep Windows running on existing hardware?
Think it's a matter of perspective. Linux for example runs on very old hardware well.
MS Windows just needs more resources in my experience and MS or OEM do not support older hardware anylonger (e.g. drivers, windiws versions). Hence, people got used to buying a new PC every so often so the softwsre they use continues working well.
Apple is kind of a special case as they own hsrdware and software. They control "obselesence".
The case of linux shows that leaner OS are key for performance and efficiency irrespective of the hardware.