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> And its this obsession with shipping things as fast as possible quality be dammed (...) You seem confused. Allocating more memory than optimal levels is not

> And its this obsession with shipping things as fast as possible quality be dammed (...) You seem confused. Allocating more memory than optimal levels is not a measure of quality. Similarly, a web page is not suddenly lower quality if an image asset is 50kb instead of 25kb. And how much complexity and engineering effort and bugs are you willing to tolerate to halve your memory allocations? You are conflating quality with mindless minimization, not even knowing or caring that are the tradeoffs. The blog post you're commenting on starts by presenting the case for celebrating small improvements, even 1% improvements at a time. A similar 1% improvement in a mobile app is at like 1MB. Do you ever notice it? How many hours of engineering effort are you hoping to spend on this nonsense? And you prefer to spend it on this or in actually fixing a bug or implementing a feature? This puerile conflation of minimization with quality suggests your personal notion of quality has no bearing on what quality actually is.

ffsm8 14d ago
> And how much complexity and engineering effort and bugs are you willing to tolerate to halve your memory allocations? You seem to be confused about this relationship. It's usually exactly the opposite. The wasteful applications are generally not well reasoned about and half assed implementations. That's why they're guzzling resources There is ofc a middle ground, because targeting eg incredibly resource constrained embedded systems will naturally increase complexity, but that's something entirely different to the scenario this discussion was about up to this point.
- BSDobelix 14d ago
  Exactly, that`s why i refuse to call 99.9% of "software engineers" engineers. Imagine you optimize a aircraft turbine 1%....man you get to drink a pool of champagne with the highest ceo's and aircraft carriers try to buy that turbine as fast as possible. But with software and a install base of some millions 1% optimization is seen as wasteful, its like software slop is acceptable since forever because hardware gets faster, and electricity is "green" anyway.
HappMacDonald 13d ago
Resource constraints have historically been a bastion of quality engineering, though. The relationship is not directly causal, but any time an engineer must not only solve a problem but _fit it within some kind of a budget_ vs having an unlimited budget, it forces them to slow down and think more carefully about what they are producing and how well it actually functions. Ultimately it is an expression of anti-fragility: some minimal challenge must be met and conquered on many different axes of a production in order to help the full production itself mature to the best possible quality. It is the same reason we exercise, the same reason that cars and toilets and so many products greatly increase in quality after emissions and usage and waste-related regulations get applied from above, etc. The appreciation of the refining force of outside limitations is not about min-maxing, but it is at least partly about curbing the min-maxing of other concerns such as "ship the fastest garbage possible to move on to the next opportunity to repeat that process".

ffsm8 14d ago

> And how much complexity and engineering effort and bugs are you willing to tolerate to halve your memory allocations? You seem to be confused about this relationship. It's usually exactly the opposite. The wasteful applications are generally not well reasoned about and half assed implementations. That's why they're guzzling resources There is ofc a middle ground, because targeting eg incredibly resource constrained embedded systems will naturally increase complexity, but that's something entirely different to the scenario this discussion was about up to this point.

BSDobelix 14d ago
Exactly, that`s why i refuse to call 99.9% of "software engineers" engineers. Imagine you optimize a aircraft turbine 1%....man you get to drink a pool of champagne with the highest ceo's and aircraft carriers try to buy that turbine as fast as possible. But with software and a install base of some millions 1% optimization is seen as wasteful, its like software slop is acceptable since forever because hardware gets faster, and electricity is "green" anyway.

HappMacDonald 13d ago

Resource constraints have historically been a bastion of quality engineering, though. The relationship is not directly causal, but any time an engineer must not only solve a problem but _fit it within some kind of a budget_ vs having an unlimited budget, it forces them to slow down and think more carefully about what they are producing and how well it actually functions. Ultimately it is an expression of anti-fragility: some minimal challenge must be met and conquered on many different axes of a production in order to help the full production itself mature to the best possible quality. It is the same reason we exercise, the same reason that cars and toilets and so many products greatly increase in quality after emissions and usage and waste-related regulations get applied from above, etc. The appreciation of the refining force of outside limitations is not about min-maxing, but it is at least partly about curbing the min-maxing of other concerns such as "ship the fastest garbage possible to move on to the next opportunity to repeat that process".