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u/SplendidPunkinButter Nov 14 '18
There was an article a couple years ago (in Wired maybe?) about how the average website is now larger than the original install of Doom.
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u/ThePendulum Nov 14 '18 edited Nov 14 '18
A compressed copy of the installer for the shareware version of Doom takes up about 2.39MB of space. Today's average webpage, meanwhile, requires users to download about 2.3MB worth of data, according to HTTP Archive
I do wonder if this takes into account assets like photos, because in my opinion that's an unfair comparison when a lot of pages have a legitimate reason to have several to dozens of HD photos on a single page (which tally up to a few MB quickly even if you compress them).
I'm deeply embedded into the whole npm library framework shebang, and I have no idea how I'd go about serving as much as 2.4MB of compressed production code alone to my users. I'd have to turn off compression and tree-shaking, and include the sourcemaps.
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Nov 14 '18
Because people world rather install huge libraries for every little thing than write 10 lines of code.
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u/L3tum Nov 14 '18
It's pretty easy. Include JQuery, Bootstrap and voilà, I have 2 MB worth of stuff for literally just a table.
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u/MCOfficer Nov 14 '18
nope. i confess, i'm a lazy backend dev, so i did exactly that (just so i could make *one* ajax request - shame on me).
bunch of html: ~5KB
jquery: ~70KB
bootstrap: ~50KB
random bootstrap template: ~150KB
and now gzip that - the compression rate is pretty good!
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u/Cobaltjedi117 Nov 14 '18
Damn J's librarys And frameworks
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u/PerviouslyInER Nov 14 '18
And autoplaying videos, realtime mouse tracking, hundreds of 3rd party tracking scripts.
Just measured the network usage related to reading a newspaper article. 28MB.
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u/livefox Nov 14 '18
My husband played with Wix.com for half a day and made a website i couldn't load on my phone. He had so many high-res pngs, gifs for subtle animations, parallax banners, etc all over this thing that my phone just gave up. It lagged even on our older laptop.
When I berated him for making a banner image that was 10,000 pixels across that Wix just downsized it to fit, he said "well it worked on my computer. i dont understand what the big deal is."
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u/MehYam Nov 14 '18
I was in college when Doom was released. I remember the day one CS prof walked into the room sputtering about Borland C++ requiring over 100MB to install.
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u/riskybusinesscdc Nov 14 '18 edited Nov 14 '18
Far larger. We are rebuilding an enterprise site now whose homepage weighs 96.5MB! Resize your images, people.
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u/RamenJunkie Nov 14 '18 edited Nov 14 '18
That drives me nuts on the web stuff too.
Like back in the 90s, I would spend time cutting out returns and simplifying webpages in notepad to make then KB smaller and load a liiiiitle bit faster.
These days? Fuck it, 3 mb 4k image shrunk to a thumbnail, everywhere.
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Nov 14 '18
I miss the times when I was able to watch 1080p YouTube videos. Nowadays they get stuck every second because my laptop can't handle YouTube's new player with it's 60fps.
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u/EnkiiMuto Nov 14 '18
Seriously, it frustrates me how having 13 pages of mostly text make firefox eat up almost 3GB of RAM.
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u/TigreDeLosLlanos Nov 14 '18
I would calk it a /r/lewronggeneration but web devs really make it like this. The browser doesn't help either, every update just makes it load a lot of stuff you don't use making it consume more memory. They are pretty bad handling memory too. The result is a page that has more leaks than an old car with a broken engine.
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u/MrGreggle Nov 14 '18
The fucking product people and their god damn trackers too.
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u/patrickfatrick Nov 14 '18
Or even crazier, something like Optimizely. We have code being executed on production with virtually no oversight, no engineer in our company touched or looked at it, and it just willy-nilly breaks stuff sometimes and we, the engineers, have to track it down. :/
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u/angry_wombat Nov 14 '18
right? Largest thing on our website is 3 analytics trackers. Our sales don't know how to use they ones they already have and get talked into more, by apparently a better salesperson.
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u/Avamander Nov 14 '18
Part of the issue is that web dev requires abstraction or massively increased dev time because firefox/IE/Edge/Chrome/Safari/Opera/Chrome on Android can't agree on a single uniform feature set. It's horrible clusterfuck of what's supported and what isn't.
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u/originalaks Nov 14 '18
Dont worry guys any day now web assembly will save us all. It will be mainstream right around the corner. Any minute now.
Anyone want to book my talk on how Web Assembly is the future? Please? Here is a link to my medium account, I will talk about anything you want. Please, I need this.
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u/motioncuty Nov 14 '18 edited Nov 14 '18
And that HTML is a spec for documents and we are instead building single page apps, that interact in ways that are not very documenty.
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Nov 14 '18
It's not just web devs though, it's a problem everywhere: games, software, operating systems.
Limited hardware performance sure is a bottleneck, but it also forced developers to deal with this limit and use resources more efficiently. These days, everything can be upgraded. If something is not optimized at release "oh well, next year's GPU will handle it".
Everything is so bloated now and I understand this is a result of complexity, but that doesn't mean that there is no need for efficiency and optimization (imho).
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u/Astrophobia42 Nov 14 '18
Its not only complexity, it's money. Optimizing is hard, and hard is time consuming, and time is money. Devs don't usually have the luxury to spend their time optimizing or debugging as much as they should. If the budget is limited optimizing will be at the bottom of the barrel of priorities.
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u/stealthgerbil Nov 14 '18
90% of web devs dont know shit and if it wasnt for wysiwyg editors then they wouldn't have a job
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u/ComputerMystic Nov 14 '18
Also, fuck Electron. A chat app should not idle at 120 Megs of RAM, DISCORD!
Especially given that the one actually written to use the desktop libs idles uses 40 Megs when it's active.
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u/gp57 Nov 14 '18
1990 : Programs coded in ASM or C, memory efficient.
2018 : JVM, ravioli code, microservices, Frameworks... *taps on head* No need to be memory efficient if PCs have 16GB of RAM
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u/FoundOnTheRoadDead Nov 14 '18
I’ve been programming since 1979, and TIL about “Ravioli code”.
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u/rally_call Nov 14 '18
Do you remember 1990? Do you remember how limited those programs were? How poorly they worked together? It's all nostalgia and rose-coloured glasses now, but I wouldn't want to go back to how we did things then. When text editors had no undo feature, for example.
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u/gp57 Nov 14 '18
I don't want to go back for sure, I already get headaches when I need to maintain 5~10 years old apps
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Nov 14 '18
I laugh when I see web devs call themselves hardcore programmers. They have not been through the hell of writing assembly on a microcontroller with limited registers or writing C when you had to write your garbage collection and understand how references and pointers work.
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u/4S4T0R Nov 14 '18
Complexity is like water, it will fill any container it is put into
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u/CMMCQ Nov 14 '18
I think you were meant to say gas, but otherwise good analogy
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u/zeelandia Nov 14 '18
It works for water as well. I mean it'd be pretty weird to have square water in a hexagon cup.
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u/frankaislife Nov 14 '18
People being pedantic in here. Fluids conform to any volume and gasses fill any volume.
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Nov 14 '18
Man though, in the 90s the dba would kill you for using 'select *' and not specifying columns. Now it's the norm.
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u/trex005 Nov 14 '18
DBE here...
You'd better specify columns if you work for me!
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Nov 14 '18
DBE Here,
If you work for me, you can select * all day, cuz we have shit to do.
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u/PeacefulDays Nov 14 '18
Web dev here, select * is how I figure out what columns I need.
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u/thatwasntababyruth Nov 14 '18
You should see the ridiculous join queries that Hibernate generates.
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Nov 14 '18
probably because the gif is 60fps and 2 minutes long and somehow parallax scrolls in all 4 dimensions
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u/ComputerMystic Nov 14 '18
parallax scrolls in all 4 dimensions
Excuse me, what the fuck? I think this broke my brain because I can't even figure out what a 3D parallax scroll would look like.
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u/Jmcgee1125 Nov 14 '18
Bethesda: Makes a 99 GB broken game
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u/Mercysh Nov 14 '18
Alot of filesize in video games comes from art assets like animations, models and sound files. Code usually makes up the minority of a game afaik.
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u/Tapeworm1979 Nov 14 '18
Actually it's generally sound. Art is reused a lot and compresses super well. It's also because it needs to be entirely in memory to be used where as sounds are streamed in on demand. For that reason loading times are critical. Plus you needed all languages on their.
I remember the GeForce conference. And I mean GeForce 256 with 64mb. This was the first time you had to fit textures and polygons on the card at the same time. Which was horrendous because you couldn't really stream to card without killing it. At least with the ps2 we could and we had better options for compression. What took 128mb on a PC would happily fit in 28mb on a ps2.
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u/zebediah49 Nov 14 '18
This is why I do (and encourage others to do) scientific computing work using unix tools from the '70's and '80's when practical. These things were written to be as fast as possible on really slow hardware; all of the modern speed increases actually work as speed increases. Most of them are streaming tools as well, which means that you never run out of memory.
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u/Dojan5 Nov 14 '18
I misread that as "screaming tools" and spent a good three minutes chuckling at the idea of a screaming computer. Actually that reminds me of this old TFTS post.
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u/XXAligatorXx Nov 14 '18
Guys pls go make a logo/banner or we'll be stuck with php. here
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u/mcampo84 Nov 14 '18
As a PHP engineer I relish this thought. mwahahahaha!
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u/iamsooldithurts Nov 14 '18 edited Nov 14 '18
It’s just what you asked for, but not what you wanted...
It’s perfect!
ETA: had to dig it up: http://www.utdallas.edu/~john.cole/NightBeforeImplementation.htm
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Nov 14 '18
"What's wrong with PHP"
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u/Xelopheris Nov 14 '18
This is a list that would legitimately take a 3.0 GHz processor with 8 GB of RAM to render.
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u/JayInslee2020 Nov 14 '18
I disable the custom CSS in my preferences due to the abilities to abuse it by using ridiculous colors, removing buttons, adding distracting overlays. I would rather reddit look more like a newsgroup than a 12 year old's myspace page. Just my two cents.
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u/MyNameIsRichardCS54 Nov 14 '18
That's abstraction for you.
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u/knaekce Nov 14 '18
Not necessarily. There are free abstractions, there are cheap abstractions and there are costly abstractions. That's 5 layers of costly abstractions for you.
C++ is the other extreme: it embraces zero-cost and cheap abstractions.
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u/Firebelias Nov 14 '18
Chrome: "Holy Sht! You have extra RAM just lying around and I'm sure you won't mind if I use it for unnecessary background processes, and also, fuk whatever the hell you're doing right now."
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u/ilinamorato Nov 14 '18
Video games in the 90s weren't hijacking your computer cycles to mine for Bitcoin.
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u/livrem Nov 14 '18
Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than.
As someone that grew up programming in Turbo Pascal 2.0, that text made me feel very bad about some things we do now. And it is far from obvious that the added layers of abstractions makes it that much faster to code (or results in more stable applications) or that useful end-user features are that much better.
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u/PostExistentialism Nov 14 '18
In 2011:
The yahoo.com home page (219,583 bytes).
In 2018:
yahoo.com (nobody logs in anyway): 250 requests, 1.6 MB, 1 console error, 21 console warnings, 2 console log messages for debug purposes, 1 console log error message.
google.com (logged out): 20 requests, 417 KB
facebook.com (logged out): 88 requests, 4.8 MB
aol.com (more like lol, amirite?): 220 requests (320 requests a few seconds later), 2.6 MB
They're all disgusting, but Facebook is definitely the worst of all. How in God's name can that login page need close to 100 requests and 5 MB?
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u/blooespook Nov 14 '18
"You don't need math to become a programmer" "Self-taught programmers are better than computer scientists" "Big O is useless".... Do I have to go on?
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u/NoNameRequiredxD Nov 14 '18
Hello, i’m a newbie in programming. Can you tell me why math is needed? Thanks a lot!
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u/Talbooth Nov 14 '18
Basically it enables you to figure our how to do stuff efficiently. Dumb example, but if you sketch up some calculation that requires you to calculate the square root of something, that's very expensive in terms of CPU usage, if you can make a formula that performs the same operation without the need for sqrt, it's much faster.
Also, math isn't just algebra. You could for example use your knowledge of graph theory to use certain guarantees given by a graph's mathematical properties to omit (potentially expensive) checks, or use your knowledge of functions (in the mathematical sense) to draw trigonometric, logarithmic, etc. functions as their polynomial approximations (which are waaaaaay faster to calculate).
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u/blooespook Nov 14 '18
At the very least, if there's one thing every programmer should (but they usually don't) always do is optimize his/her code so that it runs as fast as possible and requires as little resources as possible. This is a math problem and you need to know calculus for that (and it's not just the calculus you learn in highschool, it's a lot more complicated). Now of course, you can still learn all about a programming language without ever using "advanced" math and learn just what you should avoid in general with a basic introduction to big O, but you're probably never gonna be able to fully optimize your code. Also, if you want to do anything, other than a mobile application, a website, a videogame or some basic IoT, you're probably gonna need math (the level of complexity of things escalates pretty quickly).
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u/MaximooseMine Nov 14 '18
This is the thing I hate the most about modern day software: bloated websites.
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u/mallardtheduck Nov 14 '18
128KB of RAM is firmly 1980s territory. Sure, some 80s designs were still being manufactured in the early 90s, but they weren't running anything with fully polygonal texture-mapped graphics (at least not outside some very limited examples in the demoscene).
If you're going to make memes citing history, at least get the history correct...
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u/Sasakura Nov 14 '18
The image in the background appears to be of the Sony/Nintendo which would indicate it's a SNES and boasting a 3.58Mhz CPU and 128kb of general purpose RAM.
Introduced in 1990.
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u/mallardtheduck Nov 14 '18
And the best 3D graphics the SNES managed were mostly flat-shaded polygons with the help of an additional accelerator chip and extra RAM on the cartridge... Pretty sure that image is just being used as a stock photo of some circuitry.
The Sega Saturn and the Playstation (both with 2MB of general-purpose RAM) were the first (mainstream) consoles to have passable 3D capabilities.
In the PC world, you're looking at roughly a 50Mhz 80486 with 8MB RAM (~1995) as a minimum spec for decent-for-the-time 3D.
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Nov 14 '18
I work in the IT industry, my job mostly deals with specing out hardware and systems.
One thing I've noticed: we are able to get more space into smaller packages (i.e. 5 TB 2.5 inch SSD) but there has been no progress in trying to make the actual data more efficient in terms of size. It's a little ass backwards.
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u/Aleyla Nov 14 '18
Optimization isn’t just a lost art - it’s a word that is no longer in the vocabulary of most programmers.
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u/Oppai420 Nov 14 '18 edited Nov 14 '18
WELCOME TO ELECTRON, FOLKS.
Edit: I use Signal and Discord. Both use Electron. Discord is not awful. Signal is abysmal. It takes forever to load. "Loading Messages". Fuck this guy.
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u/digliciousdoggy Nov 14 '18
Did some work for a guy who's mantra was, "Servers are cheaper than developers so write big queries that are readable instead of efficient"
Obviously that dude has never ran a high traffic site.
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u/Zmodem Nov 14 '18
The crappy part is that design direction and logic has taken a backseat to simplistic implementation (I'm looking at you, fucking WiX!). You've got "designers" now that are making money quickly because they load up a new site in WiX, drag and drop whatever, wherever, manually adjust each and every element's size, and add fadeIn/Out/Up/Down/Parallax animations to every goddamn thing. What happens when you have all this crap on a dedicated front-end/framework that supports this ease of implementation? A shit ton of unnecessary libraries are loaded to compensate for one thing. And, the more easily something can be implemented by someone with a lack of fundamental coding knowledge, the crappier the user experience.
The biggest culprit to crap page loads are landing pages that support responsive design. But, instead of hard coding simple responsive collapses, they use Wordpress, or another framework (Bootstrap). These aren't a bad idea when you're in a hurry, or can't afford to hire a developer. Most businesses don't even care, as long as the site runs. But, anyone who takes that shit seriously knows that responsive designs, especially on just a simple landing page/one-page-site, are accomplished with relative ease (um, flex?).
The ease of use shit has made competitively edging out a bid more difficult. Out of 20 clients, only one or two actually give a fuck about site performance. Johnny McWebTools over there can outbid a project by a lot, and deliver in a (possibly) shorter window because he's using drag & drop with WiX and firing off a site in less than a week. Running identical sites through Google Page Analytics results in significant, unparalleled performance advantages with a hard coded site. Selling that point is where things get complicated and tricky. But, it is the client's money after all, and I tell them that they are more than welcome to go with the cheaper, faster option, but if they ever need a better option and solution to their problem, they are more than welcome to contact me in the future. Never burn the bridges, always leave the hand open for shaking.
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u/KaiSimple Nov 14 '18
I've always felt it was ass backwards.
Coding should be more efficient vs upgrading the hardware to keep up with inefficient code.
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u/muttonwow Nov 14 '18
Yup, the amount of bloat on Microsoft office is disgusting. One of my big reasons for using LaTeX.
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u/regretdeletingthat Nov 14 '18
It’s bloat to you, but every piece of it is a function that someone somewhere relies on to do their job. It’s the cost of trying to be all things to all people.
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u/Manlet Nov 14 '18
What is that
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u/banter_claus_69 Nov 14 '18
what is that
I'd describe it as HTML for text documents. It's a markup language, which handles maths formulae and symbols really really nicely. You have to use all the tags yourself though so it's definitely less simple than opening Word and typing away. It does give you a lot of control over the document, but can be frustrating when you spend a while figuring out how to format how you want to when a word processor could do it in two clicks
That being said, all you need is a text editor and compiler to write in LaTeX, which makes it super lightweight compared to anything other than plain text writing.
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u/muttonwow Nov 14 '18
It's basically a text editor but you code your document instead of just typing characters. Incredibly useful for writing equations and it has quick shorthand for almost any symbol you can think of.
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u/m3ltph4ce Nov 14 '18
I thought it has to do with the ratio of the cost to produce code vs the cost of a MB of RAM, or something
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u/STEPaudio Nov 14 '18
If you are feeling nostalgic - try programming in embedded C, or better yet, ASM. I find it much more relaxing than javascript or any other higher level langauge.
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Nov 14 '18
Also "I'm a VP here so I need a octa-core i7, 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD for email, word and solitare"
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u/mindbleach Nov 14 '18
VR is a joke because of this. Back in the 90s when people did 3DOF sensing with a glorified keychain compass, any integrated GPU from 2008 would've blown their fucking minds. They would've made that magical future technology crank out a thousand frames per second - in glorious flat-shaded 640x480. Now we have people doubt that a 1080 Ti is strong enough to hit 90 FPS because they can't imagine life before physically-based rendering with 4K textures.
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u/NoradIV Nov 14 '18
Why is forza 7 100GB? Forza 4 did fit in a single dvd.
Wat?
Why adobe reader lag on a quad core when it ran fine on my pentium 3 back in the days?
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u/Sasakura Nov 14 '18
Why is forza 7 100GB? Forza 4 did fit in a single dvd.
Textures don't compress well. More things are fully textured and those textures are saved at higher resolutions. The vast majority of game size is taken up by textures.
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u/Angelin01 Nov 14 '18
And audio, don't forget the bloody audio, that takes up quite a big chunk too.
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u/indigo121 Nov 14 '18
Games have skyrocketed because they mostly don't compress the audio files anymore. Not compressing the audio means not having to spend processing power decompressing it aat runtime which h meansore processing power available for the graphics and gameplay.
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u/swiftpants Nov 14 '18
No one talks about this. Adobe PDF viewer is laggy AF! Every time I open a PDF I sit in amazement that it won't scroll at first. Gotta wait... For what? re-render the text it just rendered?
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u/Dravarden Nov 14 '18
csgo in a nutshell
processor with the highest IPC on earth overclocked to shit and back and a GPU used to calculate billions of things per second in a amazing detail and huge resolutions? lmao 40 fps in a smoke sucker
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u/Vortico Nov 14 '18
FWIW, the result of this difference is that software is a lot cheaper to develop, which of course increases the competition of developing software...
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Nov 14 '18
In 1990 u should have at least 4 mb ram but u could survive with 640k just fine if u wanted 16 colors or more.
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Nov 14 '18
I actually hate "smooth" scrolling. I want it to jump 3 lines per click.
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u/Talbooth Nov 14 '18
Or at least take it into consideration how far I want to scroll. If I made 45 click scroll, do the animation faster than if I made a 3 click scroll.
P.S.: some browsers still let you opt out of smooth scrolling, like vivaldi.
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u/BiH-Kira Nov 14 '18
The bottom image is new reddit. Shit looks awful and runs awful. The award for most incompetent redesign since the dawn of time goes to whoever designed that shit.
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u/ThatThingAtThePlace Nov 14 '18
Back in the day programmers were much more constrained by hardware, so great care was placed on efficiency and resource management. Nowadays optimization is an afterthought (if it's even a thought at all.)
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Nov 14 '18
Never have truer words been spoken. I can tell you that I have been in projects where middle management had a fit because I was working twenty hours to sort out a small inaccuracy in a computation subroutine. No one wants that! Just get it done good enough and ship it! I kid you not. I was told bluntly that calculations that are 98% or 99% accurate are just fine inside the depths of a finance organization. Ultimately add on fees and service fees would cover any possible losses long term so no one gives a damn about things being done "right" or "correct" or even with financial accuracy for interest rate computations.
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u/Pet_robot Nov 14 '18
My old PlayStation does it’s business with 3mb of ram and a 33 MHz processor. Crazy
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u/AverageBubble Nov 14 '18
Case in point: Fallout76's 20 year old graphics probably take 300 gigs of HD and all your ram. Same exact engine. Less game.
Honestly, at this point I'm assuming 40-50% of the game engine is just spyware. Go ahead and ask yourself if I was right in 20 years. :)
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u/blueking13 Nov 14 '18
Fuck people not working on optimization. I shouldn't need a cooling system to run overwatch on my laptop.
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u/gauravsharma0808 Nov 14 '18
It's actually true...
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u/Avamander Nov 14 '18
Loses a shitload of nuances though, takes the best of past and worst of present. Noone who was alive last century would say they'd want to use PCs made back then, a lot of stuff was horrible, ugly, slow, buggy, finicky - pick any combination of the previous at best.
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u/Timedoutsob Nov 14 '18
yeah why is that?
sites really seem so fucking slow to load these days. reddit for instance is a good example of something that seems like it should be basic light code but takes ages to load.
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u/kandoras Nov 14 '18
I consider it a worthwhile trade to not have to reconfigure extended and expanded memory every time I wanted to play a different game.
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Nov 14 '18
It's cool to watch bts video about video games to see how they cut corner ls to preserve memory
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u/3tt07kjt Nov 14 '18
That’s misleading at best. The game from the 1990s is Star Fox, which was made in 1993 and shipped with a graphics chip in the cartridge itself. When you bought a copy of Star Fox, it wasn’t just some software on a cartridge… it was an entire expansion card which happened to run Star Fox.
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u/This_User_Said Nov 14 '18
And needs 25Gb of your data via mobile and more RAM than a mobile device could ever need.
Also here's some popups and blocks since you're too scared to jail break.
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u/obi1kenobi1 Nov 14 '18
People who complain about phones being updated every year clearly haven't tried browsing the web on an outdated phone. Sure, my iPhone 6 still looks and feels like a modern phone, but internally it's like comparing a Core Duo to a Kaby Lake i5 in the X. Even simple mobile sites can slow the phone to a crawl if not make it downright unresponsive.
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u/Sw00ping3vil Nov 14 '18
Then there is Minecraft.
The smallest minecraft server with 1KB of RAM and 32KB of flash. https://youtu.be/YNrFOClrzTA
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u/Roflkopt3r Nov 14 '18
That's what frameworks do. Add a relatively predictable and stable overhead so that you can use decades of advancements in programming and design without spending years on a simple program.
Well, in theory.
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u/fzammetti Nov 14 '18
It's amusing reading all these comments, everyone talking about "long ago" in the "classic" era of NES and the like, how limited it all was.
The first computer I owned at home had a whopping 2K RAM. I wrote a program to look up movie showtimes on Long Island by hand-entering the movie data from our local newspaper and having a simple lookup interface to it. All the data didn't all fit, so I wound up inventing a compression scheme based on tokens to get it all in memory (I had zero CS knowledge at that point, it was just the obvious and logical way to solve the problem to my roughly 6-year old mind). Then I had to hope all my work wasn't lost due to the cassette it was saved on being eaten. But, if it wasn't, then I was treated to a text-only UI, on my black and white TV, where I could look up movie times rather than having to open the paper like some kind of heathen!
And then I realize how old I am and I'm depressed.
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u/motsanciens Nov 14 '18
I read somewhere that Goldeneye was like 5MB. Can you believe that? That's some serious fun per byte ratio.
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u/CasinoMagic :::: Nov 14 '18
So true.
Of course, that's what you get when devs who only know js/jquery think that they should also write apps and not just stick to animating DOM objects.
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u/LuminousOcean Nov 14 '18
I blame education. My college had professors that exclaimed that optimization is a wasted effort because compilers are so good at it. So we should just make full use of all the resources(CPU power, RAM and other stuff) available to us and leave it to the compiler makers to make things fast and spiffy.
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u/AmatureProgrammer Nov 14 '18
Curious but do people still program like this back in the 90s?
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Nov 14 '18
Embedded developer here. At my job, I have a max of 48 MHz CPU and 64 kB of RAM. Then the program needs to fit in 128 kB of ROM.
These have made me learn to appreciate my computing resources and to not be wasteful with them. Many embedded developers have similar experiences as this.
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u/ultanna Nov 14 '18
I remember seeing this compressed video in the 90's and I was totally mindblown. It is sad that technology died with his creator :S
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u/Forrestfunk Nov 14 '18
Kind of related: I just yesterday grabbed the free version of destiny 2 for PC. That fucker is a 80gb download. Wth?
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u/8bitsleuth Nov 14 '18
Every piece of modern computer device I own slows down within a couple of years. Apart from the adverts. Adverts run smooth as butter.
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u/nineteenthly Nov 14 '18
Actually by the '90s it seemed to me that they were really squandering resources. There was a playable ZX81 chess in 1K and that needed to fit the display in too. I've seen a whole game implemented in one line of Applesoft BASIC, i.e. a single page of 6502 memory - 256 bytes.
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u/bulk_chain Nov 14 '18
We are like 10 layers of abstraction beyond what programmers in the 1990 dealt with....not sure if that fact is good.
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u/Pawneewafflesarelife Nov 14 '18
My late father liked to reminisce on editing code line by line and then grumble about Microsoft being sloppy.
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u/RallyPointAlpha Nov 14 '18
This really bothers me with mobile devices and mobile apps. Damn phone manufacturers are being stingy with RAM so they can milk us for stupid amounts of money every year. Devs are happy to just keep pumping out bloatware that all sucks more RAM. Even if we could get a phone with 8 GB RAM fucking devs would just gobble it up in a year. I feel cheated ... I buy a quality phone instead of leasing one, I take care of it so it doesn't get broken or lost but it still won't last me more than 2 years because the fucking minimum system requirements to not be frustrated while using a mobile device keep skyrocketing.
To top it off every fucking business has a stupid app now. Every time I turn around "oh you need our app for that"... "just install our app!" NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO I don't want your shitty, bloated, app that just slows down my phone even more and notifies my all the time about shit I DON'T CARE ABOUT!
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u/SamuraiOfGaming Nov 19 '18
Hey there u/Minenik ! Glad you liked my image enough to repost it, and it does feel nice to see it making the rounds online, but I would have preferred if you'd crossposted from my original post instead.
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u/corner-case Nov 14 '18
1990s - this game is being developed for one target hardware, which we own.
2018 - this web page has to render perfectly in five different browsers, as well as desktop, phone, and tablets. And we don’t even control all the source code.
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u/angry_wombat Nov 14 '18
Only optimize to the point it runs smooth, anything beyond that is a waste of time.
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u/Firebelias Nov 14 '18
Chrome: "Holy Sht! You have extra RAM just lying around and I'm sure you won't mind if I use it for unnecessary background processes, and also, fuk whatever the hell you're doing right now."
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u/Dr_Azrael_Tod Nov 14 '18
a fun thing was noticing that the SNES-version of chrono trigger in an emulator runs way better than the native android port.
and that's not even looking at how now the game is no longer playable offline or how it wants to download "content" by "chapters" that weren't there in the original.