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Software bloating to consume all available space is a long-observed trend that has been called Eroom's law, for Moore's law backwards. What Moore's law giveth,

by api 6y ago

Software bloating to consume all available space is a long-observed trend that has been called Eroom's law, for Moore's law backwards. What Moore's law giveth, Eroom's law taketh away. Here is what an 8-bit CPU with 64KiB of RAM could do in 1986: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9k5Xa2PpEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9k5Xa2PpEg Obviously this is far behind current UIs in areas like resolution and graphics, but it's not so strikingly far behind that it's unusable or unrecognizable. Does it really take gigabytes of RAM and multiple 2+ghz cores to deliver the same basic paradigm as this 8-bit CPU in 1986, but in 32-bit color, 4K resolution, and with better language and character set support? Really? What would a quad-core 2ghz machine with 16GiB of RAM be able to do if software were written in equivalently efficient ways, dispensing with so much unnecessary bloat and layers of indirection?

matthewmacleod 6y ago
* Does it really take gigabytes of RAM and multiple 2+ghz cores to deliver the same basic paradigm as this 8-bit CPU in 1986, but in 32-bit color, 4K resolution, and with better language and character set support? Really?* You haven’t described what modern software does though. You’ve just listed a random subset of features.
- api 6y ago
  Modern software that does more or less the same thing as old software uses 10X to sometimes as much as 100X the resources to do the same thing. I am arguing that more colors, higher resolutions, and prettier text is not sufficient to account for this bloat. Examples: simple paint programs, text editors, terminals, mail clients, basic word processing, and so on. In all cases resource requirements have exploded to an extent that can't easily be explained by gains in features or capability.