Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Maybe the answer to soaring RAM prices is to use less of it

Opinion Register readers of a certain age will recall the events of the 1970s, where a shortage of fuel due to various international disagreements resulted in queues, conflicts, and rising costs. One result was a drive toward greater efficiencies. Perhaps it's time to apply those lessons to the current memory shortage.

As memory prices continue to rise, it is time engineers reconsidered their applications and toolchains' voracious appetite for memory. Does a simple web page really need megabytes to show a user the modern equivalent of Hello World? Today's Windows Task Manager executable occupies 6 MB of disk space. It demands almost 70 MB before it will show a user just how much of a memory hog Chrome is these days. The original weighs in at 85 KB on disk. Its successor is not orders of magnitude more functional.

Those who remember effective software running in kilobytes rather than gigabytes have long shaken their heads at the profligate ways of modern engineering. But as tech progress marched on and memory densities seemed destined to increase without end, protesting about bloat felt a lot like "old man yells at cloud."

Enter the AI boom. As the world races to pack datacenters full of computing gear, memory prices have rocketed in recent months and currently show no signs of returning to levels where a developer could shrug and bolt on another multi-megabyte framework to meet an arbitrary user requirement.

Developers should consider precisely how much of a framework they really need and devote effort to efficiency. Managers must ensure they also have the space to do so. The energy spent securing a toolchain should go into checking its efficiency too.

It is often joked that the memory and computing power that enabled humans to land on the Moon compare poorly to those of a modern smartphone. However, it is not so very long ago that perfectly usable applications and operating systems ran from floppy disks on devices with RAM measured in kilobytes rather than megabytes.

Reversing decades of application growth will not happen overnight. It requires a change of thinking and a different outlook. Toolchains must be rethought, and rewards should be given for compactness, both at rest and in operation.

In the 1970s, a shortage of energy spurred efficiency. In the 2020s, a shortage of computer memory might finally result in software that doesn't fill every byte with needless fluff. ®