Hacker News Reader

Comment by guardian5x | Hacker News Reader

Let me be the devils advocate here. Ok, let's say you optimize that TODO list app to only use 16 mb of RAM. What did you gain by that? Would you buy a smartphone that has less RAM now?

View on HN

16MB still seems massive for this kind of app. I ran Visual Studio 4, not an app, but an entire app factory, on a 66MHz 486 with 16MB RAM. And it was snappy. A TODO list app that uses system UI elements could be significantly smaller.

What do I gain if more developers take this approach? Lightning fast performance. Faster backups. Decreased battery drain => longer battery service lifetime => more time in between hardware refreshes. Improved security posture due to orders of magnitude less SLOC. Improved reliability from decreased complexity.

16MB is less than a display buffer for a 4k display. It is never ever going to happen again just due to hardware realities.

Less RAM usage doesn't equal better performances or faster software. It actually might mean the opposite, if you're not caching things in RAM.

If a TODO list app has more than 16MB of data it could possibly cache in RAM then there is already something seriously wrong.

Easier to run your todo list at the same time as applications that need the RAM for raw function. Maybe that’s CAD, maybe that’s A/V production, maybe it’s a context window.

It’s been convenient that we can throw better hardware at our constraints regularly. Our convenience much less our personal economic functions is not necessarily what markets will generally optimize for, much like developers of electron apps aren’t optimizing for user resources.

It’s the upgrade treadmill you would stop using, and stick to the initial entry device.

If only there wasn't a security update treadmill forcing everyone to do regular hardware upgrades.

Of course, as long as we're in the dreamland, most of these security upgrades do not actually require a hardware upgrade.

Technically no (except for the gradual performance drop they introduce, + occasional TPM bullshit), but of course in practice, companies see this as a choice of spending money on back-porting security fixes to a growing range of hardware, vs. making money by not doing that and forcing everyone to buy new hardware instead.

I’m running Windows 10 ESU on a 13 year old PC without issues. While it’s admittedly near the end of its life (mostly just due to Windows 11, though I might repurpose it for Linux), I’m expecting the next one to also last a decade or longer.

So is my wife, her laptop is still decent today, but doesn't support Win 11. I'm not worried about Microsoft as much as certain other competitors killing it - similarly to how she was forced to update to Windows 10 in the first place because, one day, out of the sudden, her web browser decided to refuse running on Windows 7.

My "new" computer is a laptop with an 8th-gen i5 and 8 gb ram salvaged from the Windows 11-incompatibility heap (actually 3 of them, so I have 16gb in it). I installed Kubuntu on it and it runs extremely well. I can even install Windows 11 in a VM if I really need it. I'll probably be buying new (old) ram for it and maybe a bigger drive.

We can't ever escape the market forces? You're right, of course if software gets less bloated, vendors will "value-optimize" hardware so in the end, computers keep being barely usable as they are today.

This year's average phone is already going to have less RAM than last year's average phone - so anything that reduces the footprint of the apps (and even more importantly, websites) we're using can only be a good thing. Plus it extends the usable life of current hardware.

Sure, but the price increase will be less, because less ram. Also, the need to keep buying new computers will decrease, because this year's computer isn't much better then last years (but now we can run more/better software!)

Less bloat is 100% always a good thing, no matter what the market conditions are.

It would be nice for browser tabs and apps to reload less often.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com