Why Bloat Is Still Software’s Biggest Vulnerability
A 2024 plea for lean software

https://spectrum.ieee.org/lean-software-development

An interesting read especially regarding bloat and software protection.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Feb 13, 2024

it's very true, but a very old topic. millions of lines of code with no extensive auditing are a great way to build exploitable software. Even then, there will always be mistakes that slip through. Faster machines will let them make bigger, and bigger programs; to put those mistakes into.

 

My latest DAW choice has been based on (or against) Bloat!

 

I totally agree that devs should strive for less bloated software, unfortunately this has been a chicken and egg problem forever now. And i see it only getting worse as time goes on now that we're seeing very sizeable performance jumps each generation now that theres a wealth of really fierce competition.

Hell, it's even a law! lmao
Andy and Bill's law - Wikipedia

 

Coders gonna code

 

Back in 96 or 97, Microsoft approved the release of a bundle of toys their programmers had worked on in their spare time. That bundle was called PowerToys. A ~200 KiB archive of ~ten small tools taking up very little disk space, RAM and CPU. All of them were written in C/C++ by skilled systems programmers.

In 2018, Microsoft revived this tradition with the release of PowerToys for Windows 10. PowerToys now comes with twenty toys. The installation package now clocks in at 250 MiB (a >500 fold increase per toy). PowerToys is now written in C++, C# and Python by entry level application programmers.

These are still toys with limited functionality. But Microsoft's "toys" now use 150 times the memory, 500 times the disk space and 30-200 times the CPU for LESS functionality than hobbyist tools written in the early 2000s and released for free back then.

And it's not just the "toys" anymore. It's core Windows functionality. Remember when Microsoft presented their new Terminal for Windows 10 that would reach parity with Mac OS and Linux?

Everyone: "This is hundreds of times slower than the old Windows terminal or any Mac OS or Linux terminal for that matter."
MS: "It's fast enough. Shut your face, lol."

Outside devs kept accusing MS of malicious inefficiency with their Terminal, MS kept firing back. This eventually prompted one of the developers, Casey Muratori, to spend an evening hacking together a prototype to confront MS with their own incompetence. Casey's one-off evening solo effort outperformed MS' six months team effort many thousand fold. And it wasn't galaxy sized brain levels of optimisations Casey had come up with.

The episode was so humbling that a couple of weeks later a senior MS employee stepped in and conceded that ... everyone else was right and they'd try again with a fresh approach.

This culture of doing less than the bare minimum is now pervasive. Companies are actively at war against their own products.

This is something Steve Jobs was right about. Don't let the product managers win. But the product managers are winning and they're forcing the engineers out.

Fire your last senior developer, hire entry level programmers. Feed the money back to yourself, the board and investors. No money left to improve your product? Fuck it, rewrite everything in Javascript or Python. Native code, manual memory management? It's the current year, bro. Just ship a copy of Chromium for that sick GUI refresh and make people buy the same plugin again. From 500 KiB to 160 MiB in an instant.

Looking at you, UVI.

I just checked, I have FOURTEEN copies of Chromium on my PC (libcef.dll).

It's getting absurd. And it's on the verge of becoming acceptable. "Always been this way, grew up with it." or "They've been adding features, though. Like this button is now animated, bro. Worth the 2G increase in memory usage.".

And it's not just memory, RAM and CPU. It's also latency. Software and hardware now exhibit far more latency than they used to. Try finding a combination of editor, keyboard, mouse, controller and screen that is as low latency as your shitty 1997 TV/VGA setup. Impossible. (To be fair, screens are now magnitudes better than a decade ago and are close to beating CRTs in almost every metric).

Intentionally inefficient, wasteful use of resources is THE great, heinous crime of the 21st century. I mean it. Crime. Straight to the woodchipper with you levels of crime.

Boeing killing hundreds of people to save $320,000 per plane levels of crime.

Almost certainly a pop-sci anecdote, but spot on with regards to human nature in any case: "The Romans invented the steam engine, but were too short-sighted to see the long term benefits of replacing slave labour, so simply forgot about it again."

 

Last edited: Feb 13, 2024

This one hurts especially.
It's like a symbol of the bloatware
BTW, Bias Amp, FX.. all have it for the fucking GUI and Tone cloud.