Bloat is intentional and fills Microsoft’s wallet.

Optimization drains Microsoft’s wallet.

But I think the reason that most modern software performs badly is because of optimization: we're optimizing to reduce production costs over increasing performance.

It's economic in nature. We minimize production costs by using frameworks and other labor-saving tools. The code produced using these tools tends to be poor, but hardware is cheap enough to make up for poorly performing software.

It's an intentional decision.

Well, all of that type of bloat is presumably useful to someone or it wouldn't have been written. That doesn't change the fact that there's a cost for including it.

> Windows indexes files in the background

But here's an example of the tradeoffs. I hate this behavior. It incurs an overhead that provides no benefit that matters to me. So, your useful feature is my useless bloat.

Everything's a tradeoff.

If bloat is useful, notepad in any form on any version of Windows is bloat by definition.

You've got CLI editors that are smaller.

For some reason even in fairly constrained subtrees it takes forever to find file names.

This was done also in Win 7. It didn't have such a performance hit, but it was the first thing to be disabled after installing windows.

Back then I would turn it off as I didn't find the search function that usable, and more than once I've had a "clean and build" process fail because some file was open and being indexed, and since Windows locks files on read, the build could not delete the file and just aborted. So, I turned it off.

I notice that I get completely different results on my home and work machines doing the "start button, type" search. for "Downloads", expecting C:\Users\Username\Downloads, the home machine figures it out after three characters. The work machine seems to have decided that I clearly want "File Explorer, not any particular directory" and "Change how I download updates in spite of it being a corporate-managed box where I probably can't push that button without asking IT to remote in and do so" are what I want, even when I spot it the whole directory name.

Two threads in !OpenAdatper12 spending ~1.5M cycles per second. Two threads in !recalloc spending ~256K cycles per second.

As shipped, this is no longer a single executable, it is a collection of 230 files, totaling 10.5MB, about half of which are bytewise duplicates, and another significant chunk have overlapping responsibilities, between the icon fonts and png icons.

"Software bloat is a process whereby successive versions of a computer program become perceptibly slower, use more memory, disk space or processing power, or have higher hardware requirements than the previous version, while making only dubious user-perceptible improvements or suffering from feature creep." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bloat

I'm not aware of any substantial new features. It uses a new renderer, but this does not produce a significant observable difference from the previous one beyond using more memory. It supports dark mode.

It also describes a very real thing.

While there are a lot of things that everyone would agree counts as "bloat", there are also areas of disagreement in the form of "one person's bloat is another's essential feature".