Application framework bloat is a thing. The typical OS today is filled with so many layers of garbage that it consumes free resources. If you look at Mac OS X then you will see Tiger apps could run in the low tens of MBs but now it's hundreds of MB. Things nowadays are wrappers around Electron FWs which is a total memory suck and slow as your imagination. Electron is the gutter of SW development but all the app developers are moving their apps to build on top of it, or already have.
Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Most text is now utf-8/Unicode, which requires at last 2x memory for the same text length in comparison with ASCII/ISO-8859. No? Are you thinking of UTI-16?
> No? Or maybe author's native language is not English. :D UTF-8 does require twice as much bytes for Cyrillic, for example. Besides, there's a lot of other operations that happen in modern OS that makes text editing more expensive. E.g. modern applications need to account for bidirectional text, so things like "determining the correspondence between a character on screen and in memory" suddenly require table lookups…
Your conjecture is correct. I should have said that utf-8 could require more memory. My native language is not English. Apologies for any incorrections.
Also, I concur with your point re: complex text editing.
Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Most text is now utf-8/Unicode, which requires at last 2x memory for the same text length in comparison with ASCII/ISO-8859. No? Are you thinking of UTI-16?
> No? Or maybe author's native language is not English. :D UTF-8 does require twice as much bytes for Cyrillic, for example. Besides, there's a lot of other operations that happen in modern OS that makes text editing more expensive. E.g. modern applications need to account for bidirectional text, so things like "determining the correspondence between a character on screen and in memory" suddenly require table lookups…
Cyrillic can not be expressed in ASCII/ISO-8859 so comparing the size doesn't make sense.
Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)
#64You 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…
There was stuff that was always slow, stuff that involved processing a whole lot of data. Like building, or archiving, or generating reports etc. People wanted faster computers for that. UI was not slow, text editing was not slow, networking was not slow (WWW was, of course, because loading GIFs on dialup took time, but telnet connections into a box with less compute and less memory than my home router has nowadays were snappy). User interaction used to be real-time, non-interactive data-crunching tasks were really slow.
Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)
#65One reason for more memory is we have largely given up on the dll dream in favour of container level abstractions (which includes the way desktop apps are going). The idea of using the operating system to paint UI widgets is positively quaint, at least on the desktop. We are also 64 bit now. Every pointer in every app is twice as wide as twenty years ago, and we love pointers, especially in higher level languages. Th…
> We are also 64 bit now. Every pointer in every app is twice as wide as twenty years ago, and we love pointers, especially in higher level languages.
I really wish x32 and arm64ilp32 would have taken off.
Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)
#66It is more true about the Internet. More and more web pages use more bloated libraries, and more complex solutions.
There is more data, more communication, more patterns, more services, more styles.
If you want a blog there is no need for fancy libraries with a fancy frameworks, probably.
I think this could be passed to the whole software / hardware situation.
Do you need a fancy desktop? Does not Gnome look better than XFCE? But you want a shiny desktop with nice animations, nice icons.
It is also required by the producent for the product to be more complicated and fragile. Now you cannot have offline software. There needs to be telemetry. Therefore there need to be internet logins. Therefore hackers are a higher threat. Why does my calculator on Xiaomi phone need permissions for gathering private data? I know maybe to select some units, but comes on!
https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No? Or maybe author's native language is not English. :D UTF-8 does require twice as much bytes for Cyrillic, for example. Besides, there's a lot of other operations that happen in modern OS that makes text editing more expensive. E.g. modern applications need to account for bidirectional text, so things like "determining the correspondence between a character on screen and in memory" suddenly require table lookups…
Cyrillic can not be expressed in ASCII/ISO-8859 so comparing the size doesn't make sense.
Well, it can be expressed with a one-byte encoding like cp1251, cp866 or KOI8-R which are commonly (albeit incorrectly) called ASCII.
Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)
#68You 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…
Anecdote Alert: I remember using winamp in the olden days and everything about it was instant, no hint of lag. Then it died. Then it was resurrected and is as laggy as everything else is these days.
Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)
#69Very simple: as computers get faster, the incentives for reducing the need of resources of software decrease. You used to need to optimise, otherwise the software would be unusable or not fit on a floppy disk. You don't need to do that anymore, which is a good thing as it makes software cheaper and faster to write. Software is more cost-efficient because it needs to be less resource-efficient.
I recently made a WPF GUI tool. It's very simple, just a dozen controls total. It's all default textboxes, buttons, and flat colors, not even any images. It weighs EIGHTY MEGABYTES, I have to ship a dozen files AND it still requires .net installed on the client machine. However, my main job is embedded firmware. Honestly, I prefer working with such constrained systems. Kilobytes of flash and RAM, CPU so slow I have t…
It weighs EIGHTY MEGABYTES,
And had you put in a bit more time and effort you could have gotten it down to 8 MB, and with even more effort, 800KB. But you didn't because it worked and it doesn't matter and no ones care and you had more important things to do with your time. Multiply this by the entire software industry and you have your answer.
Re: Why do software nowadays take so much more memory and processing power (2020)
#70You 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…
This isn't my experience. I just went to a Computer museum and they had a TRS-80 from the 1980s. The keyboard latency was incredibly low, and text editing (typing programs in Basic) felt a lot more responsive than using Google Docs, Microsoft Word 365 or a modern IDE.
A lot of things used to be slow, but they involved doing a lot of math or loading data from external storage. The computer "staples" of simple spreadsheets, text editing, using a calculator etc had a faster user experience than today's computers.
But you are actually right that software "did less". The thing is that most applications don't need to "do a lot". What a lot of users need from computers changed little, but we added a ridiculous amount of overhead to it.