Recently I've been working with some legacy Win32 C/C++ code and had the thought, why don't I take all of these hard-coded #defines and Win32 message numbers, w

Recently I've been working with some legacy Win32 C/C++ code and had the thought, why don't I take all of these hard-coded #defines and Win32 message numbers, window-class names, etc. and put these magic numbers in an Sqlite database instead? Of course I'd be loading a lot of data from disk into RAM that would have simply been encoded as immediate values in the executable before. But my rough estimate still puts this at (at least) an order of magnitude less RAM than abstraction layers like WPF use. And that's when I realized: we jumped from severely resource constrained designed straight to completely wasteful designs without adequately exploring the design space in between. To paraphrase Richard Feynman's quote, "There's plenty of room at the bottom": "There's plenty of room in the middle."