Comment by bayindirh
14 hours ago
Yes, but this doesn't prevent you from being mindful and selecting the right tools with smaller memory footprint while providing the features you need.
Go's "GC disadvantage" is turned on its head by developing "Zero Allocation" libraries which run blazingly fast with fixed memory footprints. Similarly, rolling your own high performance/efficient code where it matters can save tremendous amounts of memory where it matters.
Of course more features and safety nets will consume memory, but we don't have to waste it like there are no other things running on the system, no?
> And this is all before you take into account that modern graphics and audio is bitmap / PCM and running at resolutions literally orders of magnitude greater than anything supported by 80s micro computers.
This demo [0] is a 4kB executable. 4096 bytes. A single file. All assets, graphics, music and whatnot, and can run at high resolutions with real time rendering.
This is [1] 64kB and this [2] is 177kB. This game from the same group is 96kB with full 3D graphics [3].
[0]: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938
[1]: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1221
Programming these days, in some realms, is a lot like shopping for food - some people just take the box off the shelf, don't bother with reading the ingredients, throw it in with some heat and fluid and serve it up as a 3-star meal.
Others carefully select the ingredients, construct the parts they don't already have, spend the time to get the temperatures and oxygenation aligned, and then sit down to a humble meal for one.
Not many programmers, these days, do code-reading like baddies, as they should.
However, kids, the more you do it the better you get at it, so there is simply no excuse for shipping someone elses bloat.
Do you know how many blunt pointers are lined up underneath your BigFatFancyFeature, holding it up?
You’re not wrong, but I just can’t bring myself to agree fully with someone just dribbling with condescension as they speak, like you are here.
Christ. Drop the greybeard act, man. You’re not getting any trophies for being the most annoying one to chime in.
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> Go's "GC disadvantage" is turned on its head by developing "Zero Allocation" libraries which run blazingly fast with fixed memory footprints. Similarly, rolling your own high performance/efficient code where it matters can save tremendous amounts of memory where it matters.
The savings there would be negligible (in modern terms) but the development cost would be significantly increased.
> Of course more features and safety nets will consume memory, but we don't have to waste it like there are no other things running on the system, no?
Safety nets are not a waste. They’re a necessary cost of working with modern requirements. For example, If your personal details were stolen from a MITM attack then I’m sure you’d be asking why that piece of software wasn’t encrypting that data.
The real waste in modern software is:
1. Electron: but we are back to the cost of hiring developers
2. Application theming. But few actual users would want to go back to plain Windows 95 style widgets (many, like myself, on HN wouldn’t mind, but we are a niche and not the norm).
> This demo [0] is a 4kB executable. 4096 bytes. A single file. All assets, graphics, music and whatnot, and can run at high resolutions with real time rendering.
You quoted where i said that modern resolutions are literally orders of magnitude greater and assets stored in bitmaps / PCM then totally ignored that point.
When you wrote audio data in the 80s, you effectively wrote midi files in machine code. Obviously it wasn’t literally midi, but you’d describe notes, envelopes etc. You’d very very rarely store that audio as a waveform because audio chips then simply don’t support a high enough bitrate to make that audio sound good (nor had the storage space to save it). Whereas these days, PCM (eg WAV, MP3, FLAC, etc) sound waaaay better than midi and are much easier for programmers to work with. But even a 2 second long 16bit mono PCM waveform is going to be more than 4KB.
And modern graphics aren’t limited to 2 colour sprites (more colours were achieved via palette swapping) at 8x8 pixels. Scale that up to 32bits (not colours, bits) and you’re increasing the colour depth by literally 32 times. And that’s before you scale again from 64 pixels to thousands of pixels.
You’re then talking exponential memory growth in all dimensions.
I’ve written software for those 80s systems and modern systems too. And it’s simply ridiculous to Compare graphics and audio of those systems to modern systems without taking into account the differences in resolution, colour depth, and audio bitrates.
> Application theming
Software 30 years ago was more amenable to theming. The more system widgets you use, the more effective theming works by swapping them.
Now, we have grudging dark-mode toggles that aren't consistent or universal, not even rising to the level of configurabilty you got with Windows 3.1 themes, let alone things like libXaw3d or libneXtaw where the fundamental widget-drawing code could be swapped out silently.
I get the impression that since about 2005, theming has been on the downturn. Windows XP and OSX both were very close to having first class, user-facing theming systems, but both sort of chickened out at the last minute, and ever since, we've seen less and less control every release.
I think what you're describing as "theming" is more "custom UI". It used to be reserved for games, where stock Windows widgets broke immersion in a medieval fantasy strategy simulator and you were legally obliged to make the cursor a gauntlet or sword. But Electron said to the entire world "go to town, burn the system Human Interface Guidelines and make a branded nightmare!" when your application is a smart-bulb controller or a text editor that could perfectly well fit with native widgets.
We are talking about software development not user configuration. So “theming” here clearly refers specifically to the applications shipping non-standard UIs.
This also isn’t a trend that Electron started. Software has been shipping with bespoke UIs for nearly as long as UI toolkits have been a thing.
>But Electron said to the entire world "go to town, burn the system Human Interface Guidelines and make a branded nightmare!"
TBH this sounds pretty medieval too.
> The savings there would be negligible (in modern terms)
A word of praise for Go: it is pretty performant, while using very little memory. I inherited a few Django apps, and each thread just grows to 1GB. Running something like celery quickly eats up all memory and start thrashing. My Go replacements idle at around 20MB, and are a lot faster. It really works.
I’ve written a $SHELL and a terminal emulator in Go. It has its haters on HN but I personally rather like the language.
> The savings there would be negligible (in modern terms) but the development cost would be significantly increased.
...and this effort and small savings here and there is what brings the massive savings at the end of the day. Electron is what "4KB here and there won't hurt", "JS is a very dynamic language so we can move fast", and "time to market is king, software is cheap, network is reliable, YOLO!" banged together. It's a big "Leeroy Jenkins!" move in the worst possible sense, making users pay everyday with resources and lost productivity to save a developer a couple of hours at most.
Users are not cattle to milk, they and their time/resources also deserve respect. Electron is doing none of that.
> You quoted where i said that modern resolutions are literally orders of magnitude greater and assets stored in bitmaps / PCM then totally ignored that point.
Did you watch or ran any of these demos? Some (if not all) of them scale to 4K and all of them have more than two colors. All are hardware accelerated, too.
> And modern graphics aren’t limited to 2 colour sprites (more colours were achieved via palette swapping) at 8x8 pixels. Scale that up to 32bits (not colours, bits) and you’re increasing the colour depth by literally 32 times. And that’s before you scale again from 64 pixels to thousands of pixels.
Sorry to say that, but I know what graphics and high performance programming entails. Had two friends develop their own engines, and I manage HPC systems. I know how much memory matrices need, because everything is matrices after some point.
> Safety nets are not a waste.
I didn't say they are waste. That quote is out of context. Quoting my comment's first paragraph, which directly supports the part you quoted: "Yes, but this doesn't prevent you from being mindful and selecting the right tools with smaller memory footprint while providing the features you need."
So, what I argue is, you don't have to bring in everything and the kitchen sink if all you need is a knife and a cutting board. Bring in the countertop and some steel gloves to prevent cutting yourself.
> I’ve written software for those 80s systems and modern systems too. And it’s simply ridiculous to Compare graphics and audio of those systems to modern systems without taking into account the differences in resolution, colour depth, and audio bitrates.
Me too. I also record music and work on high performance code. While they are not moving much, I take photos and work on them too, so I know what happens under the hood.
Just watch the demos. It's worth your time.
> Electron is doing none of that.
I agree. I even said Electron was one piece of bloat I didn’t agree with my my comment. So it wasn’t factored into the calculations I was presenting to you.
> Did you watch or ran any of these demos? Some (if not all) of them scale to 4K and all of them have more than two colors.
You mean the ones you added after I replied?
> I didn't say they are waste. That quote is out of context.
Every part of your comment was quoted in my comment. Bar the stuff you added after I commented.
> Had two friends develop their own engines
I have friends who are doctors but that doesn’t mean I should be giving out medical advice ;)
> Just watch the demos. It's worth your time.
I’m familiar with the demo scene. I know what’s possible with a lot of effort. But writing cool effects for the demo scene is very different to writing software for a business which has to offset developer costs against software sales and delivery deadlines.
I’m also not advocating that software should be written in Electron. My point was modern software, even without Electron, is still going to be orders of magnitude larger in size and for the reasons I outlined.
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That first one was discussed on HN before, as its source code was also released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848097
I was sure once I saw the descriptions that what you're posting is Farbrausch prods! Do you know if anyone came close to this level since?
I'm not following the scene for the last couple of years, but I doubt that. On the other hand, there are other very capable people doing very interesting things.
That C64 demo doing sprite wizardy and 8088MPH comes to my mind. The latter one, as you most probably know, can't be emulated since it (ab)uses hardware directly. :D
As a trivia: After watching .the .product, I declared "if a computer can do this with a 64kB binary, and people can make a computer do this, I can do this", and high performance/efficient programming became my passion.
From any mundane utility to something performance sensitive, that demo is my northern star. The code I write shall be as small, performant and efficient as possible while cutting no corners. This doesn't mean everything is written in assembly, but utmost care is given how something I wrote works and feels while it's running.
Your third example seems to generate 2G of data at runtime, so misleadingly minimalistic
All of them generates tons (up to tens of gigabytes or more) of data during runtime, but they all output it, and don't store them on disk or RAM.
They are highly dynamic programs, and not very different from game engines on that regard.
> misleadingly minimalistic.
That's the magic of these programs or demoscene in general. No misleading. That's the goal.
I’m on my phone so cannot run it, but you cannot generate data and not store it somewhere. It’s going to consume either system resources (RAM/storage) or video resources (VRAM).
If your point is that it uses gigabytes of VRAM instead of system memory, then I think that is an extremely weak argument for how modern software doesn’t need much memory because all you’re doing is shifting that cost from one stack of silicon to a a different stack silicon. But the cost is still the same.
The only way around that is to dynamically generate those assets on the fly and streaming them to the video card. But then you’re sacrificing CPU efficiency for memory efficiency. So the cost is still there.
And I’ve already discussed how data compresses better as vectors than as bitmaps and PCM but is significantly harder to work with than bitmaps and waveforms. using vectors / trackers are another big trick for demos that aren’t really practical for a lot of day to day development because they take a little more effort and the savings in file sizes are negligible for people with multi-GB (not even TB!!!) disks.
As the saying goes: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
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