Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#221

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #220

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix. That should be one of those Tech culture “laws.” I suspect that the dependapocalyse is a significant factor. When every part of an operation has multiple context rebuilds, and resources are not shared across module boundaries, you get inefficient behavior. But I’m skeptical that there’s a will to rethink that.

> That should be one of those Tech culture “laws.” We already have something: "Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." Milton Friedman, Tyranny of the Status Quo

Thanks for that.

I feel that there is a bit of a difference, though, because that’s really a cynical (and probably accurate) observation on the behavior of bureaucracy, and I feel the temporary fix thing is of a “finer granularity,” and applies to basic human nature.

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#222

Post by FroshKiller » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

herbst wrote: post #123

No. They won't. Most games are written for the 3% who can afford a luxury gaming PC. That's how the market is working for a while now.

Most games are developed for game consoles, not high-end PCs.

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#223

Post by herbst » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

FroshKiller wrote: post #222

herbst wrote: post #123

No. They won't. Most games are written for the 3% who can afford a luxury gaming PC. That's how the market is working for a while now.

Most games are developed for game consoles, not high-end PCs.

Most AAA games maybe. All the unity games that run sh*t on anything except a high end PC aren't.

However that's more or less unity fault

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#224

Post by bdcravens » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

No, because most of your memory usage comes before a line of your code runs. That's where the efforts will be focused.

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#225

Post by LarsKrimi » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 3:42 PM UTC

I don't think many will.

But I think they should. Not only for the practical reason, but because it leads to better software in my opinion

Limitations foster creativity. Abundance kills innovation.

In my company: - All computers are refurbished and at least 10 years old. - Cloud deployments use Hetzner or self hosted machines. - All hardware in general is a bit dodgy. Our main CI/CD setup is on a very unreliable network with varying availability and bandwidth

It can be annoying once in a while but it reflects our customers reality. And it catches a lot of usability and performance bugs that we wouldn't otherwise catch

I can only recommend it

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#226

Post by ponector » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 3:51 PM UTC

sgarland wrote: post #193

jakub_g wrote: post #168

I don't believe so do for two reasons: - everyone assumes their program / website is the only thing running at the machine at a given time, and dev machines are always more powerful than user machines - it's not really lack of advanced data structures and algorithms that result in the bloat most of the time but the fact that programs and websites are delivered by large teams, there are dozens of submodules that are o…

> the fact that programs and websites are delivered by large teams, there are dozens of submodules that are often loaded even when not needed Precisely this. We had an incident once where a CSV had a postal code field be interpreted as an integer by pandas, which of course results in stripping any leading 0s. After looking at what the code needed to do, I asked why they were using pandas in the first place, as it was…

It's called resume-driven-development. You can't add stdlib into your resume while you can pandas.

If there are no guardrails, loose quality control and nobody cares about performance - why should they replace current pandas with stdlib?

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#227

Post by inigyou » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

aabdi wrote: post #95

elcritch wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately doesn’t answer the question “successful LLM project”. From what I’ve seen of GitHub and AWS this year the answer is no. That’s despite me being bullish on LLMs and finding them highly productive.

https://blog.joemag.dev/2025/10/the-new-calculus-of-ai-based... ? in aws, some of the core bedrock services have been replaced with the new serving architecture. that thing was written basically with LLMs. mind you, guy's a distinguished engineer, his team was basically all principals, but you can do it and some of the new teams are copying the style (though with less success, due to lack of technical skill).

Amazon Bedrock is their LLM serving system, so it's basically in the same class as Claude Code: AI infrastructure.

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#228

Post by rekabis » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 3:56 PM UTC

Considering how many greenfield projects are reaching for Electron, and how few of them are moving off of it, I would say not.

Until Electron based projects have viable competitors that aren’t using Electron, this nightmare will continue. There is absolutely no justification for consuming 300Mb to 4Gb of RAM when a native app doing the exact same thing typically uses 5% to 0.05% as much memory.

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#229

Post by DontchaKnowit » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

sgarland wrote: post #193

jakub_g wrote: post #168

I don't believe so do for two reasons: - everyone assumes their program / website is the only thing running at the machine at a given time, and dev machines are always more powerful than user machines - it's not really lack of advanced data structures and algorithms that result in the bloat most of the time but the fact that programs and websites are delivered by large teams, there are dozens of submodules that are o…

> the fact that programs and websites are delivered by large teams, there are dozens of submodules that are often loaded even when not needed Precisely this. We had an incident once where a CSV had a postal code field be interpreted as an integer by pandas, which of course results in stripping any leading 0s. After looking at what the code needed to do, I asked why they were using pandas in the first place, as it was…

Reason number 500 why I hate pandas with a passion. Just had basically the exact same thing happen at work

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#230

Post by ponector » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

The only way to make them to write efficient code is to force developers to do development and testing of the software on the weak machine.

At my current job we have Windows virtual machines with 4 old Xeon cores, running at 2.4Ghz and 16Gb of RAM, no GPU. Such config will force them to write efficient UI.