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I read this, and wonder why software has gotten so fat? Any simple application these days is easily on the few dozen of MB, most a few hundred, with a few on a

I read this, and wonder why software has gotten so fat? Any simple application these days is easily on the few dozen of MB, most a few hundred, with a few on a few GB in size. Why aren't we streamlining software to reduce its size? I understand we have gotten "rich" on storage, but if the trend continues... I am sure many portable devices would benefit if applications were trimmed down.

Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
My experience writing KnightOS has given me the understanding that we are wasting the obscene amount of resources available to us from modern computers.
tim333 11y ago
Because computers can take it and we have limited time / can be lazy? I'm just playing with a barcode reader I made that uses opencv to get the image from the camera. That's 100mb of code to do something you could probably do with <1 mb but it makes things easy and works.
mikhailt 11y ago
For me, it is easy to understand why, it has to do with shipping code sooner to your customers. It takes a lot of resources and time to optimize your code and the longer your customers have to wait, the more money you lose. In many cases, the extra size is due to frameworks added to the programs to speed up the development. Frameworks tend to be heavy in size because it needs to accommodate various tasks as well as many platforms it can support. It's not easy to make them modular, so you can pick what you want and leave the rest out to shrink down the size. For customers, would you rather wait a few days to get a certain feature that works out good enough in a few days or would you rather wait a few months for a feature that works great? The competition is intense, wait too long to ship a feature and you lose to competitors that managed to get it out sooner than you. So, it's tough to balance each feature and tough to say no to customers, so that you could stay focused and lean.

Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago

My experience writing KnightOS has given me the understanding that we are wasting the obscene amount of resources available to us from modern computers.

tim333 11y ago

Because computers can take it and we have limited time / can be lazy? I'm just playing with a barcode reader I made that uses opencv to get the image from the camera. That's 100mb of code to do something you could probably do with <1 mb but it makes things easy and works.

mikhailt 11y ago

For me, it is easy to understand why, it has to do with shipping code sooner to your customers. It takes a lot of resources and time to optimize your code and the longer your customers have to wait, the more money you lose. In many cases, the extra size is due to frameworks added to the programs to speed up the development. Frameworks tend to be heavy in size because it needs to accommodate various tasks as well as many platforms it can support. It's not easy to make them modular, so you can pick what you want and leave the rest out to shrink down the size. For customers, would you rather wait a few days to get a certain feature that works out good enough in a few days or would you rather wait a few months for a feature that works great? The competition is intense, wait too long to ship a feature and you lose to competitors that managed to get it out sooner than you. So, it's tough to balance each feature and tough to say no to customers, so that you could stay focused and lean.