If there was a valid reason to write software that efficiently, besides idealism, I'm sure developers would do so. But there isn't in the vast majority of cases, so we don't. iow computing resources are cheaper than labor.
I'm working on a small web app right now inside a VM and it's consuming around 2.5 GB of ram (and I believe Firefox is taking 2 GB). It's i3wm, tmux, vim, zeal, and php. So theorically, I could work on a 4 GB computer easily. But we have people here hollering that 8GB is too low for a modern machine.
Buying a beefy computer for a developer is cheap, but forcing everyone using your software to default to a 16GB computer isn't. And that's why we get when consumer software takes more ram to run than Windows XP.
skydhash|1 year ago
Buying a beefy computer for a developer is cheap, but forcing everyone using your software to default to a 16GB computer isn't. And that's why we get when consumer software takes more ram to run than Windows XP.