No, even at these high memory prices it's cheaper to produce code as fast as possible than to spend the time to optimize it for efficiency. It has always been the case that hardware improves at a faster pace than software. So what will happen is that we will get tech improvements in hardware that will reduce its price faster than we can write software to fully take advantage of the hardware. The current bottle neck that's causing the spike in memory prices will subside relatively soon so we'll be in better shape before we know it.
Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?
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Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?
#62No, even at these high memory prices it's cheaper to produce code as fast as possible than to spend the time to optimize it for efficiency. It has always been the case that hardware improves at a faster pace than software. So what will happen is that we will get tech improvements in hardware that will reduce its price faster than we can write software to fully take advantage of the hardware. The current bottle neck t…
Will we? I don’t think new capacity will come online for several years and at the current rate there’s not a lot of evidence that the new capacity won’t simply be scooped up by the big data centers like they are now. At the very least we’re in for a rough 4 years at least
Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?
#63I don't think at this point in history limitations drive the the way we do things, abundance does.
Increasingly, the "what do we have the most of?" questions will return "RAM" less and less often.
Nuclear-powered hyperscale data centers in your neighborhood disagree. Not saying it's a good thing, but like it or not, if you ask "what generally drives how we do things", that's probably it.
Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?
#64currently porting code from Go to Rust primarily motivated by memory efficiency gains
Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?
#65If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected. If buyers can't afford the hardware anymore, the studios need to adjust. It's definitively possible to scale games down a lot. There are a few AAA games that were "dumbed down" for the Switch 1 (Hogwarts, cyberpunk, ...). And that's a really low-spec device. There are two factors: existing…
Games are designed for consoles which aren't going to change in the near term.
Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?
#66AI (like alcohol) is the cause-of and solution-to all our problems.
Computer: Rewrite this python code in Go. Make it memory efficient.
Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?
#67This is sadly a Betteridge's Law of Headlines situation.
Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?
#68Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?
#69If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected. If buyers can't afford the hardware anymore, the studios need to adjust. It's definitively possible to scale games down a lot. There are a few AAA games that were "dumbed down" for the Switch 1 (Hogwarts, cyberpunk, ...). And that's a really low-spec device. There are two factors: existing…
Are programmers and their use of data structures driving up storage requirements in games though? Or is it just high poly models and high res textures?
Helldivers 2 was in the news a few months ago for "optimizing" and saving over 130gb of disk space required for installation or something to that effect. In actuality, what they did was remove an "optimization" they had implemented without ever once benchmarking and realising it was making things significantly worse. The software development industry is a freaking wreck filled with easy opportunities for improvement if only anyone gave enough of a shit about their consumers to profile their code, ever.
Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?
#70Some programmers will write more efficient code. At my $dayjob (one of the big tech companies) we're already planning a major goal next year of optimizing server code to reduce RAM requirements, and this is directly in response to the crunch. In practice I expect most optimizations will come from "stop doing stupid stuff" and not "use fancy advanced algorithms." But that's a cynical perspective so don't be cynical li…
Real, there are so many low hanging fruits for optimization but no one has time to do them. And they don’t incentivize spending your time on it either.
Especially when LLMs are used to generate most of the code anyways in bigcorps