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food for thought: code bloat

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madires:
Code bloat has become astronomical: https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2022/06/05/code-bloat-has-become-astronomical/

What do you think? Waste of energy and resources? Lazy software developers? Greedy managers, companies and shareholders?

YurkshireLad:
Legacy supoort, web frameworks and so on. Not reinventing the wheel and not wanting to remove any existing wheels.

SiliconWizard:
It's rather easy to figure out where code bloat comes from, but the interesting point is indeed to consider how wasteful it ends up being as far as resources are concerned, especially in times where software is literally everywhere, and it's only going to get worse.

bd139:
Bloat exists because it's currently cheaper to leave piles of shit everywhere than clean it up.

When performance or user experience suffers in any way then it will change.

There's a massive performance and energy usage wall coming up on the hardware side of things that will put the focus back on software efficiency.

AndyBeez:
Good engineering is having the most efficient solution to meet the engineering problem. This is why there are for example, composite materials in mechanical engineering and large scale integration in electronic engineering. But in software engineering?

If you measure 'efficiency' in avation, planes get lighter, stronger and faster over time. In computing, software just gets heavier, slower and fractured with points of failure. Only advances in hardware keep the code bloat from sinking the proverbial airship.

Moore's law not only doubles speed and storage over time but by definition, doubles the amount that can be processed and stored. Ergo, more code can fit into the same space-time variable. More 64bit code to connect my anal-ytics to my anus-ytics in the metaverse fart cloud. Why, because someone else thinks my user experience needs that? Or maybe a case of built it and they will come? No, install that shite and I will find every freakin' way of cleansing it from my valuable SSD.

Once upon a home micro, the 1,786 bytes consumed by this single icon :scared: were enough to run a program. Now you need a server farm the size of Wyoming just to store all of the world's emojis!

Code bloat or the equivalent data puke, means we have far too many computer resources to know what to do with.

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