Incredibly happy to see this series of CF articles. I was always so proud of devs back in the days where RAM and processing were scarce and who had to get creative to fit even the most basic stuff in the budget. It seemed to me that after RAM and processing became abundant, most gave up on optimization and focused on shipping instead which meant now that even with several cores, a basic notepad or music player failed to work. In a way, RAM becoming more expensive has ushered in a new era of forced optimizations, which I'm really happy for
I don't remember those days with a ton of fondness. Yes, the challenge was fun, but I really wanted to ship it and get my product in the hands of customers. Now I can spend more time thinking about what they want and less time about what the computer wants.
The vast majority of people do not care about memory efficiency on the levels we're talking about. I've never met a non-technical person who has cared. And out of the technical people that I know (which represent less than 5% of the population), no more than half of them have complained about the memory usage of an electron app.
Or, they care but they lack the vocabulary to express what they care about.
You can get a new laptop to run software A or competing software B.
You can pay $1000 for the laptop with 4GB of RAM, and software A either can't run on that or will act like pulling teeth, so that software requires you to upgrade to 16GB of RAM which will put you back another $2000.
Or you can run software B which will hum along perfectly smoothly on the original $1000 laptop.
(All of that of course simplifying right past "everyone runs every app 24/7 with five trillion browser tabs open")
Are you honestly suggesting that the end user doesn't care about having to throw exponentially more money at stuffing RAM into their PC just to make the game all their friends are playing online function?
> Or, they care but they lack the vocabulary to express what they care about.
That's speculative to the point of being conspiratorial.
> Are you honestly suggesting that the end user doesn't care about having to throw exponentially more money at stuffing RAM into their PC just to make the game all their friends are playing online function?
I'm extremely clearly not suggesting that. Don't make up things and pretend that other people said them. Engage honestly or not at all.
zer0x4d · · focus · HN ↗
jfengel · · focus · HN ↗
1vuio0pswjnm7 · · focus · HN ↗
What if they want memory efficiency
throw10920 · · focus · HN ↗
So this hypothetical is wrong.
HappMacDonald · · focus · HN ↗
You can get a new laptop to run software A or competing software B.
You can pay $1000 for the laptop with 4GB of RAM, and software A either can't run on that or will act like pulling teeth, so that software requires you to upgrade to 16GB of RAM which will put you back another $2000.
Or you can run software B which will hum along perfectly smoothly on the original $1000 laptop.
(All of that of course simplifying right past "everyone runs every app 24/7 with five trillion browser tabs open")
Are you honestly suggesting that the end user doesn't care about having to throw exponentially more money at stuffing RAM into their PC just to make the game all their friends are playing online function?
throw10920 · · focus · HN ↗
That's speculative to the point of being conspiratorial.
> Are you honestly suggesting that the end user doesn't care about having to throw exponentially more money at stuffing RAM into their PC just to make the game all their friends are playing online function?
I'm extremely clearly not suggesting that. Don't make up things and pretend that other people said them. Engage honestly or not at all.