>When someone smugly says "micro-optimisations don't matter, networks are great, CPUs fast and memory plentiful", proceeds to make an app one degree more complicated than Hello World use 4 GB of RAM and drain half my battery, I'm having dark thoughts.
TBH I don't think those are the same person. Lots of apps glued together by developers who never think about micro-optimizations, maybe under severe time crunches without QA teams or PMs who don't care and managers who chose to go with the lowest bidder, but sure, let's blame the developer.
I look at video game forums and subreddits and see the same logic when they don't like something; like, you honestly don't know how software or games are built if you are solely blaming the devs at this point.
> I look at video game forums and subreddits and see the same logic when they don't like something; like, you honestly don't know how software or games are built if you are solely blaming the devs at this point.
I always read "devs" in video game discussions as referring to the company which owns the development work rather than the programmers at the company. If someone wrote a comment, "The devs don't let their programmers do their job" on a video game forum, I would logically expand "devs" to "managers at the development company". I totally see how that's not intuitive to a developer, though; perhaps that comes from my interest in video games before I ever became a programmer.
Yeah, the problem is that the word developers can refer either to the entire game studio that made the game, including corporate leadership etc. or to the literal programmers working on it.
it's the ones who rave "microoptimizations matter goddamn it!" who will try to shave 150ms off the "send money" screen of the banking app and not notice that the app takes up 750MB of storage.
Or spend 2 days shaving off 150ms that no one asked for when we have much more pressing features. I don't care if the button is faster if the action it kicks off doesn't work. The road to hell and all of that...
But it's usually the other way around? Lightweight usually means faster. It's takes less bandwidth, it can be cached more efficiently at network edges and in CPU cache.
There exist tradeoffs that might make bulkier applications worth it, like faster and cheaper development I guess.
It's kind of funny because I'm not 100% sure which one you are talking about. I assume it's the time, storage be damned. I agree that's probably what users will say but in that world (picking speed over storage) we will see this exact same article posted with a stronger focus on the app size (the post does make at least 1 mention of app size).
No. Running a CP/M benchmark on SimH tells me my M2 MacBook is a 4,000 MHz Altair. Not very surprising since all the memory of that imaginary Altair (8 banks of 64K each!) plus the emulator probably fit in the CPU L1 cache.
I have been thinking of building something with an RP2040 or similar running an emulator for a PDP-11 or one of the 68000-based systems that could plug into an RS-232 port of a vintage terminal or just sit there on the network waiting for “serial” connections over the network.
TBH I don't think those are the same person. Lots of apps glued together by developers who never think about micro-optimizations, maybe under severe time crunches without QA teams or PMs who don't care and managers who chose to go with the lowest bidder, but sure, let's blame the developer.
I look at video game forums and subreddits and see the same logic when they don't like something; like, you honestly don't know how software or games are built if you are solely blaming the devs at this point.