[creshal]

Some of the causes for bloat apply to both commercial and floss projects:

- heavier use of serialized I/O means much lower risk of pointer corruption or related threats, but adds overhead

- so do simple safety/sanity/security checks - each by itself is harmless, but over 10-20 years they add up

- more abstraction layers and more bookkeeping to handle much more complicated hardware setups, or just the passage of time (a Y2K secure date field takes two more bytes, a 64-bit time_t takes 4 more bytes than a 32-bit one, etc.)

- userspace devs are as lazy as they can be. Gnome these days is mostly Javascript to make the constant pointless rewrites faster, something that would've been unheard of 20 years ago. (The *box WMs meanwhile are still as fast as before.)