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All those devs who were saying "ram is cheap" BTFO.
by tosti 2mo ago
All those devs who were saying "ram is cheap" BTFO.
- rock_artist 2mo agoThat's tech... Moore Law was steadily going until raw CPU got stuck for a few years, switching from single core to multicore then heterogeneous cpus, all those requiring to rewrite software in a scalable manner and then consider newer schedulers switching between performance/efficiency cores and changing CPU freqs. Also, you have Meta and Google investing in simplified performant versions of their stack for developing countries which is similar. What's funny though, I see people that sometimes says it's cheaper to build the app they need in a single prompt than to search for it.
- eru 2mo agoYou know that Moore's law is about transistor count? What worked really well for CPU in eg the 1990s was Dennard scaling. That drove the Hz higher. And Dennard scaling is what stopped working. Moore's law is alive and well.
- dgellow 2mo agoIt also was just an observation, not a strict rule set in stone
- otabdeveloper4 2mo agoMoore's "Law" is not a law, it's just an observation of market forces at a particular time.
- amelius 2mo agoBad times for the two-space copying garbage collectors.
- pjc50 2mo agoAre there any of those left? The popular VMs for Java, Javascript and dotnet are all very mature heavily tuned designs.
- nixon_why69 2mo agoThey're heavily tuned but I think having the generational hypothesis and copying longer-lived objects is still standard? As is allowing a fair amount of garbage to accumulate to increase throughput and reduce copying at the cost of memory footprint? Posting instead of researching in hopes someone smarter can chime in, because I'm lazy.
- GoblinSlayer 2mo agoMy benchmark: 1) .net app, one text field, one button; private bytes 22mb, working set 27mb 2) native app, two text fields, three buttons; private bytes 1.2mb, working set 7.3mb
- tosti 2mo ago3) electron, about:blank, 1.2GiB
- adzm 2mo agoelectron, about:blank, 90mb Just tested
- odo1242 2mo agoSeconded, the only 1.2 GB electron app I’ve made had a ~500MB ML model’s weights embedded in it
- hombre_fatal 2mo agoThat's better than the GTK4 hello world I tried out last year.
- 2mo ago
- jbverschoor 2mo agoThanks to AI, we can now one-shot convert electron to native apps ;-)
- gaigalas 2mo agoRecipe for delicious pizza: 1. Make extra greasy pizza. Nauseating-level of grease. 2. Put pizza through De-Greasinator 5000. Sounds efficient.
- inigyou 2mo agoThe grease is vaporised and inhaled by one randomly chosen Memphis resident, who permanently gets chronic asthma.
- Dylan16807 2mo agoYou only need to make the app once before running it on a million computers. So it's more like greasy flavor development, then de-greasinating the recipe before going into mass production. It's not a big efficiency impact overall, it's more about how you like to spend your flavor development time.
- m463 2mo ago"it converted my gambling app into a three-armed bandit!"
- forgetfreeman 2mo agoYeah would someone like to explain why there's an octopus in the break room?
- WD-42 2mo agoMaybe they should start with Claude.
- tveita 2mo agohttps://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html https://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html Pretty sure those devs were saying the same thing way before 2017 as well, which seems to be ~ the last time RAM was this expensive. Now RAM in the cloud, now you're really paying the Java premium.
- adrian_b 2mo agoAccording to your link, DDR5 today has the same price in real US $ as DDR3 was in 2014, during a brief spike towards high prices. Since that peak in 2014 until today, the prices were lower than now. The peak in 2017 was more than 10% lower than today. To reach permanently higher prices than today, we must go backwards until 2011. So we have already regressed at least 12 years into the past, but more likely 15 years, and it is unknown how much more we will regress.
- zahlman 2mo ago> we have already regressed at least... It seems worth noting here that DDR5 RAM is faster than DDR3 RAM, and was not even available until 2020.
- tosti 2mo agoPrice per GiB is skewed by definition. 10 Years ago, 8GiB was enough and cost between $10 and $20. For the longest time this century, a cheap build was in the $250 to $350 range. Nowadays I'm having trouble with that price range building from used parts.
- shepherdjerred 2mo agoOK I’ll take the bait. Were devs supposed to optimize RAM for a shortage that might come? I’m guessing you had enough foresight to stockpile RAM?
- compiler-devel 2mo agoWhat’s implied here is that devs were supposed to optimize for user resources, not for developer convenience.
- IncreasePosts 2mo agoMaybe we can have AI rewrite those programs and optimize for low ram usage
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoMaybe; if it's a Js / electron app there's a lower boundary though. The main issue is that the web (html/css) is the most versatile UX platform out there, nothing even comes close. You can't build most web apps' unique visual style in any other platform. Yet. Let alone have it crossplatform.
- theevilsharpie 2mo ago> You can't build most web apps' unique visual style in any other platform. Every native UI framework I've ever used allows drawing directly to a canvas, and can have literally any visual style that can be created with pixels.
- pessimizer 2mo agoThey were supposed to optimize for the situation in which they weren't the only program running on a computer, and they failed to do it.
- Pavilion2095 2mo ago