alt Hacker NewsSo the 1970s oil crisis caused a shift that included fuel efficiency rules. For like, the whole time I've been a software engineer, memory footprints of a lot of software have crept up, even when they aren't really doing more.
The memory situation currently is a mess. But ... is it bad enough to get us to _change_ how we build?
Replies
It's even more hilarious because all along there has been this complaint, and then people have been like "no no who cares, features are important, dev time is important, just ship ship ship". And now memory is unaffordable and it takes 1GB RAM to display a plaintext file
Or it’ll accelerate the push to the cloud even more making the client even thinner.
If most software gets written by AI in the future and AI becomes self conscious. AI might write more memory efficient software, so there's more RAM available for the AI to grow. Basically the black mirror plaything episode.
A hard hit on Google Chrome users for sure!
What consumer software do you run that causes you to run out of memory or feel constrained? Even my phone has 16gb of ram. I need to run slack 16times to run out? Lol
llms make it trivial writing code in rust, without even knowing rust. There is hope…
That would be a great outcome of this situation. I doubt it will happen though: unlike fuel efficiency rules, there aren’t likely to be external pressures like that on software. Outside developer circles most users likely are unaware of memory usage and often just accept that computers are slow and unreliable sometimes. That’s different from drivers who see their fuel gauge and the corresponding cost of fuel, and are thus very aware of what fuel efficiency means.