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In my opinion, a lot of "software bloat" we see these days for apps running on user machines comes from a mismatch between the developer machine and the user ma
by Joeri 3y ago
In my opinion, a lot of "software bloat" we see these days for apps running on user machines comes from a mismatch between the developer machine and the user machine. The developer is often equipped with a high-end workstation as they simply need those resources to do their job, but they end up using the same machine to do basic testing.
Incidentally, I think the reason they need those specs is the same: the people building the dev tools all have top end hardware, and what’s fast enough for them is good enough to ship. I don’t think the people building the dev tools at meta, or apple, or google are seriously considering the use case of a developer working on an old dual core 8 gb machine, but that’s the reality in large parts of the world.
- crote 3y agoTo a certain extent, yes. On the other hand, development tools simply require a lot of resources: a debug build is always going to be more demanding than a production build, and a full recompilation of something like Firefox is never going to be fast. I reckon a lot of developers are more than happy to sacrifice 8GB of RAM for near-instant advanced autocomplete and typechecking, but we should keep in mind that it should not become a requirement to do basic development.
- marcosdumay 3y agoOh, I agree that this is the cause, but no thanks. I will keep using the heavyweight development tools that run through all of my code discovering problems, analyzing its quality, changing it into more performant code, deducting all kinds of new code to complete my high-level view, and doing all kinds of the modern benefits that use my computer to replace my work. I can get behind testing the resulting executable on a low-power machine. But not on using it for everything.