Submission + - Code bloat has become astronomical (positech.co.uk) 3
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: An indie game programmer Cliff Harris shares his concerns about the current state of compute: Code bloat sounds like something that grumpy old programmers in their fifties (like me) make a big deal out of, because we are grumpy and old and also grumpy. I get that. But us being old and grumpy means complaining when code runs 50% slower than it should, or is 50% too big. This is way, way, way beyond that. We are at the point where I honestly do believe that 99.9% of the code in files on your PC is absolutely useless and is never even executed. Its just there, in a suite of 65 DLLS, all because some coder wanted to do something trivial, like save out a bitmap and had *no idea how easy that is*, so they just imported an entire bucketful of bloatware to achieve it.
Like I say, I really should not be annoyed at young programmers doing this. Its what they learned. They have no idea what high performance or constraint-based development is. When you tell them the original game Elite had a sprawling galaxy, space combat in 3D, a career progression system, trading and thousands of planets to explore, and it was 64k, I guess they HEAR you, but they don’t REALLY understand the gap between that, and what we have now.
Computers are so fast these days that you should be able to consider them absolute magic. Everything that you could possibly imagine should happen between the 60ths of a second of the refresh rate. And yet, when I click the volume icon on my microsoft surface laptop (pretty new), there is a VISIBLE DELAY as the machine gradually builds up a new user interface element, and eventually works out what icons to draw and has them pop-in and they go live. It takes ACTUAL TIME. I suspect a half second, which in CPU time, is like a billion fucking years.
Like I say, I really should not be annoyed at young programmers doing this. Its what they learned. They have no idea what high performance or constraint-based development is. When you tell them the original game Elite had a sprawling galaxy, space combat in 3D, a career progression system, trading and thousands of planets to explore, and it was 64k, I guess they HEAR you, but they don’t REALLY understand the gap between that, and what we have now.
Computers are so fast these days that you should be able to consider them absolute magic. Everything that you could possibly imagine should happen between the 60ths of a second of the refresh rate. And yet, when I click the volume icon on my microsoft surface laptop (pretty new), there is a VISIBLE DELAY as the machine gradually builds up a new user interface element, and eventually works out what icons to draw and has them pop-in and they go live. It takes ACTUAL TIME. I suspect a half second, which in CPU time, is like a billion fucking years.
Correction (Score:2)
The original disk Elite ran in a mix of Mode 1 and Mode 2 on the BBC, so that would have taken 10k. off the RAM, so the original Elite fit into 17-22k of RAM, with disk paging to give you some variety in ships encountered and in-station trading.
The cassette version did that, minus a little variety and asteroids, in just the 17k of RAM. Or, if you like, 7.5% of the space needed to load, not run, jQuery.
All this. (Score:2)
All this is because everyone today programs on huge frameworks that have everything including two full size kitchen sinks, one for right handed people and one for left handed.
I don't mind having libraries around doing things that are common, but they shall be distinct - and we can of course also look at the situation of static linking or dynamic linking.
Code bloat has been astronomical for a long time (Score:2)
A lot of code bloat is due to:
_ Use of code of generators
_ Cut and paste programming
_ Maximizing reuse
_ Supporting multiple platforms
With that said, keep in mind that: /. crowd likes to bash Windows, you got to admit backward compatibility is outstanding
_ There is a lot more functionality than before.
_ Some software has been around a long time. Even though
_ A lot of things like security were not taken in consideration
_ It's a different computing environment.... multi tasking, internet, gpus
_ in the old days