09-17-2006, 10:46 PM
What is the deal with the new wave of fatware? Is it just that companies want to release software as quickly as possible so they don't bother optimizing for space? In the good old days of computers when programmers only had 640K to work with there was a lot of effort spent figuring out how to get a complicated program to fit in that space. Now we have 2 or 4 GB of RAM they're being way to liberal with that. I remember having a 4MB machine that ran MS Word 6.0. I look at the newest version of Word and see some differences, but the basic functions are all the same. How did it go from taking up less than 4MB to half a gig? I know that there are a lot more functions now, but there really can't be THAT many.
Apple's guilty of making fatware too. Claris Works used to take up 4MB of RAM too, and that word processing, spreadsheets, painting, drawing, and everything else. Pages now comes to 896MB on the disk. Linux programmers still seem to have fairly small programs.
I blame the compilers more than the programmers. They're most likely using C++ because it is easier to make large programs, and easier to debug. There needs to be much more research done in making compilers that optimize code and remove pieces that don't need to be compiled. Anything that can be written in C++ can be written in C given enough time, and the C program will be much much smaller and much much faster. We just have to figure out how to make compilers that think like converters more than compilers.
Sorry, I was downloading a program last night that was 400MB and it pissed me off. So I ranted about it. Comment or flame away.
Apple's guilty of making fatware too. Claris Works used to take up 4MB of RAM too, and that word processing, spreadsheets, painting, drawing, and everything else. Pages now comes to 896MB on the disk. Linux programmers still seem to have fairly small programs.
I blame the compilers more than the programmers. They're most likely using C++ because it is easier to make large programs, and easier to debug. There needs to be much more research done in making compilers that optimize code and remove pieces that don't need to be compiled. Anything that can be written in C++ can be written in C given enough time, and the C program will be much much smaller and much much faster. We just have to figure out how to make compilers that think like converters more than compilers.
Sorry, I was downloading a program last night that was 400MB and it pissed me off. So I ranted about it. Comment or flame away.
f you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear demonic voices. The scary part is that if you play it forwards it installs Windows.