My gaming PC that I built in January 2006 that IIRC I used to simultaneously run Battlefield 2, Trillian, Xfire, Thunderbird, and Winamp with a 1680x1050 monitor had 1 GB of total system RAM.
Real programming means writing your own javascript glue, pulling in hundreds of supply-chain-compromised js libraries that you never inspect or profile, and running the whole thing in a browser engine, while making sure to store all state in the cloud.
The modern breed of programmers who don't understand programming have switched from C and C++ to Rust and Go, so they're on the right track of using more resources to improve the developer and user experience, but they haven't gone nearly far enough. They still do dumb things like write efficient code, and profile and put effort into reducing binary and resident size. They should trust in javascript and the browser and the internet, like all good programmers do.
Zig programmers have completely lost the plot. They're of the type that tries to write "hello, world" manually rather than pulling in a third party library so they can efficiently call helloWorld(). Writing single-binary apps that fit on a floppy? Who even cares? What even is a floppy? How do they call themselves programmers without css and advertising telemetry?
Troll post? Or has fanboyism really gone this far?
I'm really not a huge fan of rust as a language but it is clearly delivering results in that e.g. I find myself actively hoping that people rewrite web tooling in rust and so on. C++ is a mess that should be allowed to die.
Yeah, there are some results in Firefox and some results in Mesa and some results in the linux kernel, but that's about all.
I made a little conference schedule app a few weeks ago for a conference I was at. I used my own rust UI toolkit, which calls in to cocoa to make use of native UI components. The resulting binary is about 500kb and it uses a couple megs of ram while running. It looks and feels like a totally native iOS app. As far as the OS is concerned, it is.
Even 500kb feels too big for what it is. I’m rewriting the core at the moment, and I think it’ll be more efficient as a result. But I’m still pretty happy with it.
I'm curious if you use winit for windowing, or something lower level that's just mac specific.
UI library is here: https://github.com/josephg/leptos-native
And here's the schedule viewer app I made with it. It runs silky smooth on device: https://github.com/josephg/dweb-sched
The whole project is currently experimental & vibe coded. It's missing a lot of components, and it has bugs. I'm currently rewriting it by hand to do it properly.
I tried to learn SwiftUI a few years ago. XCode was horribly slow, and it would hang and crash all the time, even when working on small example projects. I'm excited by the thought that I can use any rust IDE to write UI code. Rust's compiler, toolchain and IDEs seem way more reliable.
The view! builder macro at the moment is designed to look like JSX, since it was ported directly from leptos. But I'm considering dropping the jsx and using a fluent API. Something like this:
let count = RwSignal::new(0u32);
let view = vstack().padding(16.0).gap(12.0)
.child(label().text(move || format!("Count: {}", count.get())))
.child(
hstack().gap(8.0)
.child(button()
.on_click(move |_| count.update(|c| *c = 0))
.text("Clear"))
.child(button()
.on_click(move |_| count.update(|c| *c -= 1))
.text("-1"))
.child(button()
.on_click(move |_| count.update(|c| *c += 1))
.text("+1"))
);
The program that I use to manage my small business, basically a GUI wrapper on an sql DB is a total delight to use, because everything happens instantly. Even opening it is instantaneous.
Modern software is such a bloated mess that you kind of get used to a 20 second start-up and a .25-1 second delay on every action. Then you use something that isn't bloated junk and it feels like actual magic.
"memory usage is important": creates a 1TB binary
"take multiple steps": uses so much power, extreme global warming, it will just print "hot"
"think outside of the box": it will enslave you so you will not care about weather
Yeah, people get upset when you spew out total bullshit.
I work as a performance specialist and "AI writes code like that" is utter nonsense. AI writes the same terrible performing code that was the mediocre developer standard on Stackexchange and other codebases it ate.
You still need a lot of vigilance and time to make well performing software and most software engineers just don't give a damn if we don't outright block their PRs/feature launches before passing performance tests.
To this day I never saw an AI write anything less than a 3Mb binary. Do you have specific examples in mind, and if so, can you share them?
It's fully vibecoded, and quite functional, although I'm still working out some bugs.
In order to push beyond that (e.g. architecture, size, performance), the human has to bring the constraints. There's only so much AI can/should default assume from "write code for me" (which I expect a lot of bad / non-HN developers are doing).
It is exciting that there's an opportunity for global improvement though! After the general model improvement pace slows, expect there will be a lot of room for code gen AI optimization, and if "write code for me" can be made to generate more efficient code... suddenly all AI-generated code (read: most code) will improve.
Shit code is out in the wild because the company decided to optimize for programmer labor cost instead of code efficiency. If instead apples:apples because AI code gen is being used both ways, everyone wins.
Feels like what I imagine were the early days of optimizing compilers, when I'm sure there were a large number of really bad assembly programmers out there.
I had just built my pc with 128gb of ddr5 ram spending less than an average android phone (I think like $300).
I would like to retract that statement. Thanks.
I stated that we should stop worrying about [X] consuming [finite resource].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Fong#/media/File:John_C...
And you need code to handle device orientation, in case the PC Tower is flipped on the side.
In fact, that seems a lot. Back in ~1996 I was running one of the EFnet servers on a Compaq with 8MB of RAM.
Fortnite, PUBG, COD, all are disgraceful in comparison.
I disagree with Fortnite and PUBG, whilst PUBG is a little clunky it did usher in a completely new game style AND importantly introduced much better situational audio which other games didn't have.
It might have popularized it, but PUBG was far from the first 'Battle Royale' game. Hell...I think it goes to those old Minecraft "Hunger Games' servers, but I'm sure it predates even that
I'll never forgive EA for C&D'ing the community efforts to revive the servers. Fuck EA.