3 ms·
It's not just consumer software and not just the last 20 years. There is an axiom that software gets bigger, for no particularly good reason, for at least 40 y
by mmt 8y ago
It's not just consumer software and not just the last 20 years.
There is an axiom that software gets bigger, for no particularly good reason, for at least 40 years.
This can be witnessed in how the size of /bin/true on Unix went from 0 bytes to whatever size it is today [1]. I can't find it now, but there was an article with a bar chart showing a gradual progression through time.
Of course, on-disk size doesn't translate directly to performance, but the trivial example demonstrates mechanisms by which bloat/cruft can accumulate so gradually that no outcry is ever caused.
It also refutes the sibling/downthread comment the "cruft" is (necessarily) someone else's use case.
[1] e.g. 13k MacOS native, 52k GNU coreutils from MacPorts
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- majewsky 8y ago> There is an axiom that software gets bigger, for no particularly good reason, for at least 40 years. Sounds like a computer variant of Parkinson's law: "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion."
- mmt 8y agoClose, but not quite, since what's available (space in the specific example) isn't being filled. Alternatively, with the complaint that desktop software feels more sluggish on a modern computer than contemporaneous software did on much older hardware suggests that something is even being overfilled. My intuition says there's a different phenomenon of psychology at work here.