Why Modern Software Is Slow, Heavy, and Unstoppable
The Everything-Is-Bloated Thesis: Why Modern Software Is Slow, Heavy, and Unstoppable "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster." — Niklaus Wirth (1995) In 1969, the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer navigated humans through 240,000 miles of space and landed them on the moon using 4 kilobytes of RAM and 72 kilobytes of ROM . Today, opening a basic chat application on a $2,000 laptop requires: 1.5 Gigabytes of active system memory 14 background helper processes An entire bundled instance of Chromium 400 MB of JavaScript frameworks, asset bundles, and tracking pixels We have multi-GHz CPUs with 16+ cores, NVMe SSDs transferring 7 GB per second, and dedicated Neural Processing Units. Yet, clicking a button in a desktop calendar app introduces 300ms of input latency, and typing in a web-based text editor regularly drops frames. Modern software bloat isn't just ab...
