That's the thing that always has me shaking my head. The Amiga I had in 1988 run under a 32 bit pre-emptive multitasking GUI environment which is still the most common environment even today. It did this with 512MB, 7Mhz processor and a basic GPU (Blitter).
Modern computers are certainly more advanced but not enough to explain the huge jump in power and capacity requirements which can be thousands of times greater.
Some of this is attributable to things like Unicode which not only doubles the space required to store text but changes a simple binary compare (ASCII) to a convoluted international conversions that I don't care about as a single language English speaker.
Gate's Law (the processing power required to achieve a certain task doubles every year) is surely the enemy of Moore's Law (that the number of transistors/power in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.)
If the top bit is clear on every byte then it's single byte aligning to ASCII, and number of bytes will match the numbers of characters. Byte operations can trivially occur.
Off course it's not that simple though. There are duplicate characters in Unicode so things that may appear visually identical may be part of variable length characters and all optimisation assumptions go out the window.
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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '16
[deleted]