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Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

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Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#41

Post by TheMode »

api wrote: post #27
TheMode wrote: post #20

Because we write extensible instead of composable software. We do not distribute functions, but apps. How many instructions do you need in assembly to compute `1+1`? How many instructions do you need to open your search bar, get the calculator and do the calculation? We also make software responsible for way too much. Cross-platform is a joke. How can we expect developers to consider every platform? Obviously they wi…

It seems like sometime around the late 2000s we literally gave up on the idea of composability as a profession. I think economics has a lot to do with it. People buy apps and services, not functions and components. All the money is at the tail end of the development process when something becomes product, and that involves a lot of things that are at odds with composability.

It is also due to how unstable software is. Is it possible nowadays to write a simple calculator function and ensure that nobody will ever need to care again for the rest of the century?

Making software stable (including for example the web spec) would go a long way improving efficiency.

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#42

Post by Ekaros »

Because the end-users are paying for the costs of running software. So their resources are given zero value.

More interesting is just how expensive the server side is... It seems that you really need to get pretty bad point until someone cares about costs...

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#43

Post by beebeepka »

Thank you, teleforce, for necroing this in the middle of a yet another massive RAM and storage price crash.

We going back to 256 colour images, 320x240 textures in games, super low quality MP3 sounding worse than audio tapes? Going back to terminals?

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#44

Post by devnull3 »

A lot of it is to do with abstraction and reusability. E.g A third party lib uses hashmap for implementation but for my use-case an array would have suffice (like small number of integers over specific range). Since the 3rd party lib is essentially an implementation for union of many scenarios whereas I need only a specific set of it. This results into inevitable bloat.

The flip side is that you write all of the layers of your software and control the bloat. This now becomes an expensive option.

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#45

Post by hutzlibu »

zdragnar wrote: post #13
andrewstuart wrote: post #4

You hear this all the time "software on old machines used to be blazing fast and now software on new machines are slow". I was there for most of the old machines and my recollection is they were always slow, which is why there was a relentless race to upgrade to a faster machine and why for a very long time people replaced their computer once a year. If software and old machines were so snappy then there would have b…

Reduce your screen resolution to 640x480 and most software will feel a whole lot snappier, I bet. Pushing all those extra pixels to a 4k monitor adds a lot of overhead.

Not if GPU accelerated. If software rendered(or bad GPU), then yes, you should see a big difference.

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#46

Post by spoiler »

MAGZine wrote: post #12

Because software is more complicated. And more complicated software (in addition to the primary effect of being complicated) is further slowed by abstraction and indirection, which slows performance but doesn't increase functionality. Software that ran on dos or windows 3.1 WAS fast. But it also didn't have much in the way of UI.

In addition to UI and all that entails (and I assume people not working with graphics or UIs often forget or underestimate the ungodly amounts that entails) theres safer memory models, encryptions, multi tasking, etc etc.

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#48

Post by asdff »

andrewstuart wrote: post #4

You hear this all the time "software on old machines used to be blazing fast and now software on new machines are slow". I was there for most of the old machines and my recollection is they were always slow, which is why there was a relentless race to upgrade to a faster machine and why for a very long time people replaced their computer once a year. If software and old machines were so snappy then there would have b…

Sure computers are faster today, but I think the point is that with all of this available horsepower that we have gotten quite lazy about having performant software. These GUI apps really only feel slightly faster than they did 20 years ago, but you'd think given the orders of magnitude more computing performance, the time it takes to do things like open applications, files, save, etc, would also progress at such a pace. Clearly there are inefficiencies when it takes over 10 seconds to open microsoft word on a blazingly powerful M1 cpu. using the cli on an m1, sure, everything follows as expected with lightning quick tooling at that level, but its in the gui software, the software most people use day to day, that the inefficiencies are exposed.

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#49

Post by cracrecry »

It is a very simple reason: abstraction.

The more abstract a software is, the less efficient. But it is also more flexible, easier to understand and modularise, and specially way cheaper and faster to develop.

Of all of the above cheaper and faster to develop is the main reason, by far. It is also safer with fewer bugs.

Software engineers are very expensive, the harder it is to develop something the longer it takes, the higher the economic risk.

To make something the "old way" takes years of work. People are not willing to wait nor pay for that, and the low level technologies will change over time so you could get trapped in a never ending rat's race.

Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)

#50

Post by throw__away7391 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #4

You hear this all the time "software on old machines used to be blazing fast and now software on new machines are slow". I was there for most of the old machines and my recollection is they were always slow, which is why there was a relentless race to upgrade to a faster machine and why for a very long time people replaced their computer once a year. If software and old machines were so snappy then there would have b…

That's true, I remember starting applications and running to grab a snack from the fridge while they loaded. It was not unusual to have to be careful while using certain applications to not overwhelm them with work or they'd run out of memory and crash or freeze. I recall reading a discussion specifically on this point, suggesting ways that software should elegantly handle user input to avoid this problem instead of blaming the user for being too aggressive.
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