Why is it that software has gotten so hardware heavy these days?

I get that some things require more ram, larger screen resolutions and games.

But even calculator apps are now in the hundreds of MB when the entire Microsoft office suite used to come on a couple of floppies.

Is it laziness and relying on ever higher level languages or is there some reason that stuff gets unnecessarily large now.

Part of it is probably that many developers pull in 3rd party libraries for even the simplest of tasks these days.

Optimising costs time and money. Would you pay?

Also, you need to buy more storage from us if we fill it with junk.

Webshits don't care about performance as long as it works on their high end Mac

@YADU I care.

I wouldn't say 55 floppies is "a couple". MS Office 95 installer was ~60 MB and consumed about 15% of then-common 540 MB HDD when installed, recent 2019 version is ~1.7 GB and takes up about 1.5% of the commonly-available 250 GB SSD when installed. 4 MB of RAM back in 95 would cost well over $200 ($340, adjusted for inflation), today $200 gets you 32 GB of DDR4 RAM. Now, hundreds of MB for a calculator still isn't reasonable unless it contains advanced features for use in engineering, but it's time to realise that a $300 SSD today can fit twice as much data as a $1000 SDD 5 years ago, and it simply doesn't make sense to try and make a smaller app given the availability of hardware and the cost of development.

We started to get lost away from the glory of C and C++ and RAD tools.

Seriously, the shit my ex boss pulled out at hyperspeed with Delphi still blows my mind to this day.

@hitko I was thinking of the standard version that came on 3.1 it was only 20 disks

As for memory consumption, it's probably because it loads all the necessary UWP libraries for display and execution of the app. Remember that the Windows 10 calculator is an acrylic multi page application with widgets that are unappreciated in their complexity. The layouts, rendering, and state of all the things on screen (whether or not each button is used to the full extent that the UWP framework provides) all need to live in memory.

And I hinted at it, but I'll just outright state that the calculator app is loaded up with the whole UWP framework and only really uses a few buttons and layouts. Regardless, the entire core of the framework must be loaded into memory.

Even though the responsibility of the application, which is to parse math strings and calculate them, is not very complex, the modern interface *is*. I bet if Microsoft made a console application version, it would be efficient in terms of memory footprint.

@AlgoRythm I was thinking more in terms of android as well.

I just refurbed a Samsung phone, low end obviously but it feels about as powerful as a high end phone from the first android release despite being demonstrably more powerful.

I'm not sure if it's just continuous added complexity or what.

I do wonder if a lightweight android fork is in order.

@seraphimsystems Okay, but that version only had 4 programs (word, power point, excel, mail), and the largest HDDs you could get at that time were 170 MB, with more commonly-available HDDs being around 100 MB.

Martin Thompson has a whole series of blog posts on exactly this and how to avoid it: https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/...

He starts with the following quote, which I love:
“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.” -Henry Peteroski

I think using idiotic solutions like electron (and alike) are the blame these days

Ive seen powerbi desktop client eat 20GBs of ram, not kidding. Was not a complex report at all either.

Also teams is a brilliant example. A messaging client.. that needs 1.5 gigs of ram to start? Oo

But yeah it saves having to develop a UI in 2 or three platforms :/ and people think frontend=javascript

@AlgoRythm uwp offers great memory virtualization optimizations though. Example: Loading long list of images in wpf:
2gb of ram used. (= All images, even though only few are visible)
Same list in uwp: 200mb used by entire app.

Of course uwp is not holy, but they got some parts right.

In general, developing something is a lot of work that developers do. For example, even in order to develop a high-quality platform for video conferencing, video chats, you need to make a lot of effort and spend a lot of time. By the way, the developers from https://trembit.com/ do it very well, so I recommend the services of the developers from Trembit. But in general, I'm not surprised that it takes up a lot of space.