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Discussion on: What's wrong with code in 2022? πŸ€·πŸ»β€β™€οΈ

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mariamarsh profile image
Maria 🍦 Marshmallow

This is a big problem with any modern operating system, whether it's Linux or Windows.
XUbuntu eats up 500-800 MB just after startup, and it needs 1.5-2 GB for some significant work. Win2K startuped and ran with128MB, WinXP with 256. Well, that's not entirely fair, because they were 32-bit: just to CALL to the full address, we need a 64-bit address, but XUbuntu has a difference even with WinXP by 8 times. In fairness, a workstation on Linux still doesn’t eat up more than the conventional 1-2 GB after startup, but Win10 / 11 can easily eats 2-3.

On Linux, all problems manifest themselves in exactly the same way, just try to build any open source project, it will immediately pull billions of the same open source libraries to itself. And many of them are needed only for the sake of one or two functions.
If it were not for the SSD, the available RAM, and the hardware instructions in the processors and their multithreading, the operation of computers running any modern OS would be a sad sight.

The main resources are eaten not by a bare machine, but by applications on it. Websites are almost entirely crap code, and one page "weighs" a hundred megabytes. This needs to be optimized on the server side, otherwise nothing. IDEA, VSCode and a bunch of other applications eat about the same (a lot) almost regardless of the OS. Another example for you is Jetbrains Toolbox, a little application for downloading and updating the IDE. It eats up 200-500 MB of RAM. What? How? Why?

Dependency hell can also exist in linux, I would not put 2 different versions of openssl, or libjpeg without "dances with tambourines". Look at the NPM and Composer dependencies of any site. Previously, jQuery was enough of all JS, but what about now? NPM folder can easily reach several gigabytes, and then from too many files the collector will fail and fall, great!

What about 99.9%, maybe I'm exaggerating, but the absolutely irrational loss of resources applies to both software and OS.

Thank you for your questions πŸ€—
I also advise you to read the comments of other users, there are a lot of interesting thoughts and opinions 🌈

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flkdnt profile image
Dante Foulke

"If it were not for the SSD, the available RAM, and the hardware instructions in the processors and their multi-threading, the operation of computers running any modern OS would be a sad sight." Well, yes, things are written for the current hardware standards of the day. People(developers, commuters, pedestrians) will "fill the space" of where they are. People naturally use the tools at their fingertips.

Nothing you've described is particularly new to me, but it feels like you are just describing the state of software in 2022. So, since I'm not sure what you are comparing everything to, I have to ask:

  1. What do you think the state of software should look like?
  2. What does good resource management look like to you, both from an OS perspective and a software perspective?
  3. What do you think are reasonable specs for computers(cpu, ram, HDD space, etc)?

P.S. - Linux Dependency hell is particularly frustrating because if you try to update your packages, and one of those packages was installed by pip / is dependent on something installed by pip, the package manager could fail to update anything.

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mariamarsh profile image
Maria 🍦 Marshmallow • Edited

It feels like you are a very curious young man 😏
$500 and we'll face you in a 1v1 Discord battle to see who wins, the Dark Side or the Light Side πŸ”΄βš”οΈπŸ’šYou will be in the role of Darth Vader πŸ‘Ύ
But I have a condition: I will take my father Chewbacca with me 🀣

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sleibrock profile image
Steven L

Some of these conversations can be tagged under the "static linking versus dynamic linking" category and others probably file under "software bloat". What do you think your approach to application development is with respect to static/dynamic linking? Ship with deps, or ship targeting deps on a host environment?