Comment by iugtmkbdfil834
1 day ago
I suppose it depends on what you mean by trending. Some of the recent rewrite news[1] for example suggest that, at minimum, it is the macro demand that is driving the software trends. In this case, issues with memory supply drive attempts at more sensible memory utilization.
[1]https://tech-insider.org/discord-electron-rust-gpui-rebuild-...
>https://tech-insider.org/discord-electron-rust-gpui-rebuild-...
The fact that we are celebrating that a chat app only uses 300MB ram at launch instead of 1GB seems absolutely ludicrous to me
The early versions of Skype used about 30MB RAM while in a video call and by the early 2000s standards it was bloatware. Before that we used WebEx in the 90s which was a browser ActiveX or Java applet and RAM use was about 6MB in a video call. In the early / mid 90s I used CU-SeeMe for video calls and its RAM footprint was just over 2MB on Mac System 7
Something has clearly gone very wrong in the software development process in the last 2-3 decades and while Im encouraged to see that some people are interested in reversing that trend I still find the resource wastage has me shaking my head sometimes
A lot of that RAM is just high resolution bitmaps. You can have apps that fit in 10MB of RAM today if you're comfortable with the UI quality of an app circa 2000 (e.g. icons are 16x16 pixels at 8 bit colour depth).
Usually thats not the case. Its mostly abstraction layers upon abstraction layers upon abstraction layers that causes this issue
Sometime in the late 90s there started a fundamental change in the software development process. We changed from optimising software for the end user (development is difficult) to optimising the software development process for the developer at the expense of user resources
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