Comment by ndriscoll
18 hours ago
My gaming PC that I built in January 2006 that IIRC I used to simultaneously run Battlefield 2, Trillian, Xfire, Thunderbird, and Winamp with a 1680x1050 monitor had 1 GB of total system RAM.
18 hours ago
My gaming PC that I built in January 2006 that IIRC I used to simultaneously run Battlefield 2, Trillian, Xfire, Thunderbird, and Winamp with a 1680x1050 monitor had 1 GB of total system RAM.
That's because programmers in 2006 didn't understand programming. They didn't understand how to make their software better.
Real programming means writing your own javascript glue, pulling in hundreds of supply-chain-compromised js libraries that you never inspect or profile, and running the whole thing in a browser engine, while making sure to store all state in the cloud.
The modern breed of programmers who don't understand programming have switched from C and C++ to Rust and Go, so they're on the right track of using more resources to improve the developer and user experience, but they haven't gone nearly far enough. They still do dumb things like write efficient code, and profile and put effort into reducing binary and resident size. They should trust in javascript and the browser and the internet, like all good programmers do.
Zig programmers have completely lost the plot. They're of the type that tries to write "hello, world" manually rather than pulling in a third party library so they can efficiently call helloWorld(). Writing single-binary apps that fit on a floppy? Who even cares? What even is a floppy? How do they call themselves programmers without css and advertising telemetry?
username checks out
rust programs are a lot of times faster and orders of magnitude safer than C and C++ counterparts... where is your data to support your assertion that rust programs use more resources than C and C++ programs?
Some programmers import a sarcasm library while others could write their own.
>rust programs are a lot of times faster [...] than C and C++ counterparts
Troll post? Or has fanboyism really gone this far?
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Some of us still know how to write software like that. And enjoy doing it.
I made a little conference schedule app a few weeks ago for a conference I was at. I used my own rust UI toolkit, which calls in to cocoa to make use of native UI components. The resulting binary is about 500kb and it uses a couple megs of ram while running. It looks and feels like a totally native iOS app. As far as the OS is concerned, it is.
Even 500kb feels too big for what it is. I’m rewriting the core at the moment, and I think it’ll be more efficient as a result. But I’m still pretty happy with it.
AI writes code like that, but people get pretty upset hearing it.
The program that I use to manage my small business, basically a GUI wrapper on an sql DB is a total delight to use, because everything happens instantly. Even opening it is instantaneous.
Modern software is such a bloated mess that you kind of get used to a 20 second start-up and a .25-1 second delay on every action. Then you use something that isn't bloated junk and it feels like actual magic.
>> AI writes code like that, but people get pretty upset hearing it.
To this day I never saw an AI write anything less than a 3Mb binary. Do you have specific examples in mind, and if so, can you share them?
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AI does this when it's not warranted, and even happily writes two functions with the same purpose.
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What happens if you keep asking AI to rewrite it to use less and less resources?
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> AI writes code like that, but people get pretty upset hearing it.
Yeah, people get upset when you spew out total bullshit.
I work as a performance specialist and "AI writes code like that" is utter nonsense. AI writes the same terrible performing code that was the mediocre developer standard on Stackexchange and other codebases it ate.
You still need a lot of vigilance and time to make well performing software and most software engineers just don't give a damn if we don't outright block their PRs/feature launches before passing performance tests.
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Is your UI kit open source? I do think calling into the native OS toolkits is the way to go, when they exist.
I'm curious if you use winit for windowing, or something lower level that's just mac specific.
I ported the leptos rust web framework to run on native platforms. Currently it works on ios, macos and linux (GTK). Eventually want to also add support for windows and TUI as well. It uses taffy for layout - which gives you the same flexbox and grid layout engines that web browsers use. Components are all fully native for the platform, via their corresponding binding crates (objc, gtk4, etc).
UI library is here: https://github.com/josephg/leptos-native
And here's the schedule viewer app I made with it. It runs silky smooth on device: https://github.com/josephg/dweb-sched
The whole project is currently experimental & vibe coded. It's missing a lot of components, and it has bugs. I'm currently rewriting it by hand to do it properly.
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Yeah, hence why for one kind of like the way RAM prices are going, maybe it forces the industry to re-learn best practices and "bio-programming" instead of "fast-food programming".
2 years ago I stated that we should stop worrying about software consuming a lot of ram.
I had just built my pc with 128gb of ddr5 ram spending less than an average android phone (I think like $300).
I would like to retract that statement. Thanks.
Why would you ever say something like this? When was that ever true?
On the flip side, high 5 for getting 128gb of RAM at exactly the right time!
this post was sponsored by SK Hynix
I was replaying Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch 2 and the whole time I was thinking about how this ENORMOUS, open world game originated on the Nintendo Wii, a console with only 88 MB of RAM.
Super Mario Brothers is none of that, but fits in a 40kB ROM and a few kB of RAM.
With an OS the PC requeriments for that game under Windwos XP would have been like 256MB/384MB.
And I bet you that I could still fit an XP-era weather app or widget on top of XP and Xenoblade inside that 256/384MB of RAM.
Fun fact, one of the XFire cofounders won Carmack's Ferrari at a Quake Tourney:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Fong#/media/File:John_C...
I remember within the last decade noting that minesweeper from the windows store took more space than a pretty damn healthy Win98SE install (with minesweeper)...
Yeah, but minesweeper was like 95% of Windows 98.
I just set up a web server for a hobby project on a $10 Dell PC that has 2GB of RAM welded to the board. After booting Debian 13 it still has 1.6GB of free RAM.
In fact, that seems a lot. Back in ~1996 I was running one of the EFnet servers on a Compaq with 8MB of RAM.
I still miss Battlefield 2. There is really nothing like it today, not even close. The dynamics with squads and a commander and A+ physics and overall game balance remain unmatched for all FPS games.
Fortnite, PUBG, COD, all are disgraceful in comparison.
Miss BF2 too. Sank way so many hours into that game as a kid. Still remember the wonderful loading music. 2142 was great too.
I'll never forgive EA for C&D'ing the community efforts to revive the servers. Fuck EA.
Check out BF2Hub. The community isn't big, but you can generally find a server or three with real players in it (just look for players with a ping; 0 ping means a bot).
BF2 was great, BF3 was definitely better, not that there was anything at fault of BF2.
I disagree with Fortnite and PUBG, whilst PUBG is a little clunky it did usher in a completely new game style AND importantly introduced much better situational audio which other games didn't have.
BF2 and Battlefield: Vietnam were my top 2 BF games. Loved the radio in BF:V and the ability to airlift stuff. Also, I really enjoyed the commander mode in BF2, that was ahead of its time.
I personally would attribute the better audio more towards Arma that PUBG was born from.
I miss the squad gameplay of Battlefield 2 too. It hasn't been replicated since, in my opinion, and subsequent Battlefield titles changed the classes and made the available loadout options too flexible to require specialized play.
In 2018 when Windows and macOS used 2GB just after boot, I tried Arch Linux and with a neat window manager (dwm) a clean boot was using just 300MB, that means our OS is wasting just too much RAM for nothing. This year with Fedora Atomic 44 + Niri is using 800MB, so I can give a second life to my old device from 2013.
Before I built a gaming computer circa 2004 I daily drove my family's old beige box that had a 350Mhz Pentium II with 64MB of RAM and Windows 98. I remember running CDex (because ripping CDs was all the rage), Trillian, and ZDaemon all at the same time without a hiccup. What a time to be alive!
Trillian, good old days. Still remember my icq number
Think about all the performance you could have gained by instead running Trillian and Winamp on an old Thinkpad next to you with even less ram
take me back
Haiku OS is trying.