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by Beldin 1042 days ago
That mindset is why modern-day ultrabooks give the same practical performance as 15 years ago. All of the hardware advances have been gobbled up in the name of "developer productivity".

Check (eg.) the Elevated 4k Demo winner to glimpse what modern computers are actually capable of in the hands of good developers.
2 comments
fluoridation 1041 days ago
Eh. Binary size by itself contributes very little to an application's performance.

>Check (eg.) the Elevated 4k Demo winner to glimpse what modern computers are actually capable of in the hands of good developers.

If all software were to be built using the same techniques the demo scene uses, nothing would ever get done, and if by chance a project does get released, no one would be able to maintain it afterwards. Let's not confuse art and engineering just because both use code as the medium.

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dicytea 1041 days ago
An application's performance is orthogonal to its binary size.
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GuB-42 1041 days ago
Not orthogonal, maybe diagonal.

Sizecoding productions are an exception, because they tend to use really slow and memory hungry unpackers (can take up to gigabytes of RAM to do their job, for a 4k intro!), and they tend to lack all optimization techniques that could improve speed in exchange for more code (ex: culling, etc...). And flooding memory with millions of generated objects is no problem for these productions, as long as they are not stored in the executable.

But in general, larger binaries are slower to load, simply because there is more bytes to copy from disk to RAM. And although it is not always the case (ex: sizecoding), it usually means a larger memory footprint, resulting in worse CPU cache efficiency, less memory for other apps and filesystem caches, etc... Also, large binaries tend to be a symptom of inefficient code, with too many abstraction layers, poor optimization, etc... Another very common reasons for bloated executables is that they bundle all their libraries, which means that they don't take advantage of shared libraries, requiring the OS to maintain multiple copies of the same library, possibly including some outdated or poorly optimized versions.

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