The world has moved on, that code-golf time is now spent on ad algorithms or whatever.
Escaping the constraint delivered a different future than anticipated.
it is economically not viable to try anymore.
"XYZ Corp" won't allow their developers to write their desktop app in Rust because they want to consume only 16MB RAM, then another implementation for mobile with Swift and/or Kotlin, when they can release good enough solution with React + Electron consuming 4GB RAM and reuse components with React Native.
Of course, it's never that simple in reality; you need developers who know each platform for that to work, because you must run the builds and tell the AI what it's doing wrong and iterate. Currently, you can probably get away with churning out Electron slop and waiting for users to complain about problems instead of QAing every platform. Sad!
That said, I think it’s more of a collective action problem. The person who could pay for the refactor to operate in 640 K is not the same person who has to pay for the 16 GB. And yes, the 16 GB is cheap enough in comparison to other costs that the latter group doesn’t necessarily notice that they are subsidizing inefficient development.
Not that I agree of course :) I’m talking more of the net negative of everyone needing to buy 16gb sticks so developers can YOLO vibe-coded unoptimized garbage. But at least I think the former explanation is what stavros meant :)
The costs are borne by different people: development by the company, RAM sticks by the customer.
A company is potentially (silently?) adding to the cost of the product/service that the customer has to bear by needed to have more RAM (or have the same amount, but can't do as much with it).
But most likely, it's not. At a system level we don't want people to do that. It's a waste of resources. Making a virtue out of it is bad, unless you care more about bytes than humans.
In a 5-year lifecycle that's about 10,000 years of human labour wasted. Yes, I had to quadruple-check this myself.
Does it take 10,000 work-years of effort, per project, to train its developers to write reasonably performant code?
Of course not all of this would translate into actual productivity gains but it doesn't have to.
The ones that stick out are actively maintained, widely used, and well funded. It doesn't have to be a million active users, but they should be the first to get their act together.
Unfortunately the number of users and the collective value of their wasted time doesn’t make arguing for efficiency and performance any easier.
I once noticed my name in the Chromium OS credits due to a patch I had submitted to a library that's on every Chromebook. 1 million would be a small number for Chromebooks alone.