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Economizing resource requirements (was Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures?)

From Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups comp.lang.misc
Subject Economizing resource requirements (was Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures?)
Date 2025-08-21 21:02 +0200
Organization A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID <1087qgv$14ret$1@dont-email.me> (permalink)
References (3 earlier) <1080dts$2u7bm$2@dont-email.me> <1080hed$3f6hn$1@dont-email.me> <10832ej$3knom$1@dont-email.me> <10835na$1m96$7@dont-email.me> <1085jvi$7gcv$1@dont-email.me>

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On 19/08/2025 01:44, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
> [...] (That's actually one point that annoys me in "modern"
> software development; rarely anyone seems to care economizing resource
> requirements.) [...]

On 21.08.2025 00:58, Andy Walker wrote:
> On 20/08/2025 01:43, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
>> The Linux kernel source is currently over 40 million lines, and I
>> understand the vast majority of that is device drivers.
> 
>     You seem to be making Janis's point, but that doesn't seem to
> be your intention?
> 
>> If you were to run an old OS on new hardware, that would need drivers for
>> that new hardware, too.
> 
>     Yes, but what is so special about a modern disc drive, monitor,
> keyboard, mouse, ... that it needs "the vast majority" of 40M lines more
> than its equivalent for a PDP-11?  [...]

This was actually what I was also thinking when I read Lawrence's
statement. (And even given his later more thorough list of modern
functionalities this still doesn't quite explain the need for *so*
much resource demands, IMO. I mean; didn't they flew to the moon
in capsules with computers of kilobytes of memory. Yes, nowadays
we have more features to support. But in previous days they *had*
to economize; they had to "squeeze" algorithms to fit into 1 kiB
of memory. Nowadays no one cares. And the computers running that
software are an "externality"; there's no incentive, it seems,
to write the software sophistically in an ergonomic way.)

But that was (in my initial complaint; see above) anyway just one
aspect of many.

You already mentioned documentation. There we not only see this
extreme huge and often badly structure unclear texts but also the
information to text-size ratio is often in an extreme imbalance;
to mention a few keywords, DOC, HTML, XML, JSON - and where the
problem is not (not only) that one or the other of the formats is
absolutely huge, but also that it's relatively huge compared to
an equally or better fitting use of a more primitive format.

Related to that; some HTML pages you load that contain just text
payloads of few kiB but that has not only the HTML overhead but
also loads Mebi (or Gibi?) bytes through dozens of JS libraries;
and they're not even used! And yet I haven't mentioned pages that
add more storage and performance demands due to advertisement
logic (with more delays, and "of course" not considering data
privacy); but that's of course intentionally (it's your choice).

Economy is also related to GUI ergonomy; in configurability and
usability. You can configure all sorts of GUI properties like
GUI-schemes/appearance, you can adjust buttons left or right,
but you cannot get a button with a necessary function, or one
function in an easy accessible way. GUI's are overloaded with
all sorts of trash which inevitably leads to an uneconomic use,
and necessary features are unsupported or cannot be configured.
(But providing such [only] fancy features contributes also to
the code size.)

Then there's the unnecessary dependencies. Just recently there
was a discussion about (I think) the ffmpeg tool; it was shown
that it includes hundreds of external libraries! Yet worse, many
of them not serving it's main task (video processing/converting)
but things like LDAP, and *tons* of libraries concerning Samba;
the latter is also a problem of bad software organization given
that there's so many libraries to be added for SMB "support"
(whether that should be a part of a video converter or not).

But also the performance or the systems/application design. If
you start, e.g., a picture viewer and you have to wait a long
time because the software designer thought it to be a good idea
to present the directory tree in a separate part of the window,
and to achieve that the program needs to recursively parse a
huge subdirectory structure, and until you finally see that
single picture that you wanted to see - and whose file name
you already provided as argument! - half a minute passed.

Or use of bad algorithms. Like a graphics processing software
that doesn't terminate when trying to 90° rotate a large image
because it does try to do the rotation unsophisticatedly with
a copy of the huge memory and with bit-wise operations instead
using fast and lossless in-place algorithms (that are commonly
known already since half a century).

Etc. etc. - Above just off the top of my head; there's surely
much more to say about economy and software development.

And an important consequence is that bad design and bloat will
make systems usually also less stable and unreliable. And it's
often hard (or even impossible) to fix such monstrosities.

<end of rant>

Janis

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Thread

Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-08-18 04:52 +0200
  Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Andy Walker <anw@cuboid.co.uk> - 2025-08-18 16:54 +0100
    Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-08-18 18:30 +0200
      Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Andy Walker <anw@cuboid.co.uk> - 2025-08-19 00:45 +0100
        Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-08-19 02:44 +0200
          Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Andy Walker <anw@cuboid.co.uk> - 2025-08-20 00:47 +0100
            Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-20 00:43 +0000
              Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Andy Walker <anw@cuboid.co.uk> - 2025-08-20 23:58 +0100
                Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-21 02:59 +0000
                Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Andy Walker <anw@cuboid.co.uk> - 2025-08-23 00:42 +0100
                Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-08-23 02:29 +0200
                Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-23 02:36 +0000
                Economizing resource requirements (was Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures?) Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-08-21 21:02 +0200
                Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) - 2025-10-04 01:11 +0000
                Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-10-04 03:37 +0000
                Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Andy Walker <anw@cuboid.co.uk> - 2025-10-07 22:03 +0100
                Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-10-07 22:04 +0000
                Various digressions (was Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures?) Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-10-08 01:27 +0200
                Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Andy Walker <anw@cuboid.co.uk> - 2025-10-10 01:11 +0100
                Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-10-10 01:39 +0000
                Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? Andy Walker <anw@cuboid.co.uk> - 2025-10-11 12:47 +0100
                Re: Algol 68 / Genie - opinions on local procedures? antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) - 2025-10-08 17:04 +0000
          simplicity / complexity Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-08-26 18:42 +0000
            Re: simplicity / complexity Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-27 00:28 +0000
              Re: simplicity / complexity Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-08-30 19:10 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-30 22:43 +0000
                [OT] NetBSD vs. Linux(-based systems) Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-09-04 18:50 +0000
                Re: [OT] NetBSD vs. Linux(-based systems) Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-09-05 00:03 +0000
                Re: [OT] NetBSD vs. Linux(-based systems) Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-09-07 15:55 +0000
                Re: [OT] NetBSD vs. Linux(-based systems) Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-09-07 21:17 +0000
                Re: [OT] NetBSD vs. Linux(-based systems) cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-09-05 12:02 +0000
                Re: [OT] NetBSD vs. Linux(-based systems) Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-09-07 16:30 +0000
            Re: simplicity / complexity Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-08-27 07:53 +0200
              Re: simplicity / complexity Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-08-30 19:39 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-30 22:45 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-08-31 13:35 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-08-31 22:40 +0000
                [OT] free software Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> - 2025-09-04 18:25 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) - 2025-10-08 14:03 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-10-08 16:21 +0200
                Re: simplicity / complexity John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-10-08 08:08 -0700
                Re: simplicity / complexity Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-10-08 21:18 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-10-08 14:31 -0700
                Re: simplicity / complexity Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-10-09 00:09 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-10-09 08:44 -0700
                Re: simplicity / complexity Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-10-09 21:52 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-10-09 15:21 -0700
                Re: simplicity / complexity antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) - 2025-10-09 00:34 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-10-09 03:48 +0200
                Re: simplicity / complexity ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) - 2025-10-08 14:53 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) - 2025-10-08 15:24 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) - 2025-10-09 01:39 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-10-09 04:00 +0200
                Re: simplicity / complexity antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) - 2025-10-09 14:19 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) - 2025-10-09 14:48 +0000
                Re: simplicity / complexity Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-10-10 12:36 +0200
                Re: simplicity / complexity Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-10-10 12:09 +0200
                Re: simplicity / complexity Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-08-31 08:32 +0200
                Re: simplicity / complexity Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> - 2025-08-31 08:34 +0200

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