It’s an invented problem. A program takes what a program takes. Everyone cares way more about the code being legible, the code being fast enough, and the code not using a ton of memory (and even that last one is kind of shrugged off depending on context).
Applications taking 3mb take 3mb because they do next to nothing or they do it with a bunch of shared libraries … which is a whole other dependency management mess and wasting a few mb on a drive.
There’s also a huge difference between being wasteful of something that pollutes the planet in mass and is not renewable like gasoline (which is the only reason you’d be upset about that now) and wasting a few mb on a drive.
The equivalent of your complaint 3mb vs 200mb is like complaining about a person taking a trip to the grocery store… It’s insignificant and often necessary.
You can say that program does way more than you need, but … nobody is catering to “only what you specifically need” and using the larger program almost certainly covers your needs.
Furthermore, like I already said making things smaller often makes them slower… Since CPU is more expensive to improve, of course things are bigger, that’s what more people care about. Some video games take that to an extreme with uncompressed files and 250GB install footprints … but 200mb?
Everyone cares way more about the code being legible, the code being fast enough, and the code not using a ton of memory (and even that last one is kind of shrugged off depending on context).
And then you look at real life and notice that code everywhere is slow, bloated and inefficient. But hey, it’s “legible”! To one or two devs, hopefully.
The equivalent of your complaint 3mb vs 200mb is like complaining about a person taking a trip to the grocery store
Terrible analogy. A better equivalent is someone renting a garage to store stuff inside and now, because they have so much space, there’s that urge to fill it, whether it makes sense to or not.
making things smaller often makes them slower
It’s usually the other way around. As a rule of thumb, less code = smaller size = faster execution. In theory, 1k lines of code will require less computation, less processing, than 10k.
It’s an invented problem. A program takes what a program takes. Everyone cares way more about the code being legible, the code being fast enough, and the code not using a ton of memory (and even that last one is kind of shrugged off depending on context).
Applications taking 3mb take 3mb because they do next to nothing or they do it with a bunch of shared libraries … which is a whole other dependency management mess and wasting a few mb on a drive.
There’s also a huge difference between being wasteful of something that pollutes the planet in mass and is not renewable like gasoline (which is the only reason you’d be upset about that now) and wasting a few mb on a drive.
The equivalent of your complaint 3mb vs 200mb is like complaining about a person taking a trip to the grocery store… It’s insignificant and often necessary.
You can say that program does way more than you need, but … nobody is catering to “only what you specifically need” and using the larger program almost certainly covers your needs.
Furthermore, like I already said making things smaller often makes them slower… Since CPU is more expensive to improve, of course things are bigger, that’s what more people care about. Some video games take that to an extreme with uncompressed files and 250GB install footprints … but 200mb?
And then you look at real life and notice that code everywhere is slow, bloated and inefficient. But hey, it’s “legible”! To one or two devs, hopefully.
Terrible analogy. A better equivalent is someone renting a garage to store stuff inside and now, because they have so much space, there’s that urge to fill it, whether it makes sense to or not.
It’s usually the other way around. As a rule of thumb, less code = smaller size = faster execution. In theory, 1k lines of code will require less computation, less processing, than 10k.