On the nature of bloat

On the nature of bloat

A big advance we're all missing here is that the costs associated with developing software have dropped. Yes, the layered high level toolkits introduce bloat and slowness. On the other hand, it means that you don't hav e to be an assembly language god to make a word processor. You don't need uber developers to create application stacks and they can be created relatively cheaply. Most of the increase in computing power we've seen has gone to making it possible for developers and system components to interact at higher and higher levels. If one wants to argue that it is time to reign in the madness, then I agree. We're going to multicore processors because we've hit a brick wall in processing speeds that has lasted for over a year. It also appears that 8GB is the practical limit of RAM for end user desktops with most people running 1GB or less. We can no longer assume that the machines coming down the pike will speed up applications for us.

Note: you can avoid this step in the future by logging into your LWN account.