Mario Lombardo wrote:
<snip>
> CPU and memory seem to be the consensus. It frightens me to think
> things have become so bloated. I'm not kidding. The Commodore 64 did
> something right. What it is, I have no idea. Assembly, I've been
> told, but I think it was more of the architecture. Sixty-four
> kilobytes! That's just insane these days to even comprehend, yet it
> worked... very well indeed.
>
The problem with assembler was that it was non-portable across
platforms, and it was an endless grind to program anything with it. And
of course in those days, programmers with limited memory to work with
were more frugal and conscientious. Today every programmer knows that if
his program runs like a dog, he can just tell the customer to upgrade
hardware.
One problem that comes up today is that, for example, a programmer wants
to be able to decode mp3 files in his software. Rather than building his
how decoder from scratch, he'll find a library that does this for him.
The problem is that he only needs about 25% of the code in that library
to do what he wants. But when the library gets pulled in to help his
application run, *all* of the library code becomes resident in memory.
Ergo more memory consumption. Shared libraries help, but there's still
some unused code in there regardless.
And most coders either write or find helper libraries, functions or
classes that make their work easier. If you're always having to trim the
whitespace off a string and lop off the last two characters routinely,
you're gonna write or find some code that does this. But if the code is
sloppily and wastefully written, right there's another source of bloat.
Look at the typical kernel shipped with any distro. Talk about *bloat*.
There's stuff in there you'll *never* use. There are drivers for devices
that will never get within fifty miles of your machine. Even it they're
in the form of modules you don't load, they're still sitting there as
part of the kernel, on disk, shipped from your friend neighborhood
distributor. This is probably one of the appeals of distros like Gentoo.
Here's another point. I vaguely recall that years ago, I discovered that
Netscape used javascript for some or all of its rendering. It was as
though it was really just a javascript virtual machine that interpreted
HTML. I don't know if that's still true, nor if it's true with the Gecko
based browsers. But it would explain bloat.
Paul
-- Paul M. Foster ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
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