[jonhohle]

Hertzfeld dismisses the idea, but I think it’s something more devs should take to heart.

Could someone build a tea timer app in React and save some time? How much impact to humanity does the GBs of RAM and untold CPU cycles the app now require that could be put to use elsewhere, or causes systems to be landfilled due to inefficiency?

I had a phone with GBs if RAM and a multicore processor that could barely run a single current app. I can buy a new phone, but what about the billions of people that don’t have that option?

[BobbyTables2]

What amazes me is back in the day ICQ ran in the background happily on a computer with 8MB RAM and 60Mhz CPU. Same with IRC clients.

These days Slack is occupying 4-8GB of RAM and is less snappy than a native app.

Yeah, in-lining giphy images is kinda fun. But 1000X memory consumption seems like a horrible trade off.

A modern desktop PC would have been a damn supercomputer not long ago. Today it’s kinda adequate.

[cosmic_cheese]

Absolutely. There’s very little mass-market software that has any reasonable justification for being unusable on any machine that’s roughly Core 2 Duo era or newer. It’s perfectly possible to work within those constraints and not even really that difficult, it just requires a modicum of care and understanding of what’s happening under the hood.