4 ms·

I recall building my first FLTK app in 1998 and being somewhat dismayed that it was more than 1.2 MB in size. With some craftiness I had it down to just under a

I recall building my first FLTK app in 1998 and being somewhat dismayed that it was more than 1.2 MB in size. With some craftiness I had it down to just under a Meg. It was a 3D model viewer that allowed me to load some common 3d files including vrml and do some basic manipulation like picking a face, moving it, changing its color etc. This was all in a single static executable. Maybe OpenGL was linked dynamically don't remember. What the fuck happened in the last quarter century? The desktop apps of today that do little more than my viewer take three orders of magnitude more space and run slower than my thing did on a 350MHz Pentium (GPU performance excepted as there have been impressive progress on that side). And yeah, no they are not "fast enough".

m_mueller 4y ago
15 years ago I was able to do Skype group calls just fine on the hardware available then. Since then, camera resolutions have hardly improved and yet MS Teams grinds everything else to a halt when a call starts. Just another example of things regressing. I think it has to do with a move away from tools that do one thing well to these Kraken platforms that want to eat your life.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  Counterpoint: Coolplayer (http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/ http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/) is a fairly capable MP3 player, weighing in at ~500 KB. I've used it to play MP3's on 486's back in the day. The closest modern equivalent would be Foobar2000. Foobar2000 is much larger than Coolplayer ever was, but it's also far more capable, has plugin support etc. On the other hand, both players are small compared to some modern alternatives.