Comment by josephg
20 hours ago
With the price of ram going up by 5x, I want to see our industry move in the opposite direction. Computers for regular people should go back to 4gb or even 2gb of ram, just to keep the prices sane. We should get software working well on those devices, just like it did a decade or two ago.
Small, memory efficient programs run better everywhere. It feels like theft to make consumers pay for our inefficient software. Electron / react on the desktop is such a rort.
Let's stop filling static websites with javascript. That should instantly reduce the overhead
Yep. And let’s stop putting react apps in the windows start menu.
>With the price of ram going up by 5x, I want to see our industry move in the opposite direction. Computers for regular people should go back to 4gb or even 2gb of ram, just to keep the prices sane.
Sure. Right along with Intel Core 2 Duo and Windows Vista.
Modern CPUs and memory, just less ram
Modern operating systems too. Windows xp only used a few hundred megs of ram. Windows 11 is more complex, but none of its features justifies windows 11 needing 100x as much memory to run.
Slim the fat!
I wonder how much we could reclaim just by going back to 32-bit pointers. If we're going back to 4GB it should be fine, right?
Yes and no. If I recall, 32 bit windows has a fixed allocation of 3gb for userland and 1gb for the kernel’s memory space. I think 32bit only really works well for memory sizes smaller than 4gb. It might not be worth it, given a lot of OSes are in the process of deprecating 32bit support.