Real-life optimization work

Posted Nov 2, 2005 22:03 UTC (Wed) by cantsin (guest, #4420)
In reply to: Real-life optimization work by elanthis
Parent article: All hail the speed demons (O'Reillynet)

I'm getting really sick of this "bloat" mantra.

Then explain to me why a trivial Gnome taskbar clock applet eats up as much RAM as a whole instance of vim, or the difference in code size between gnome-terminal and xterm, the duplication of functionality in different libraries, or, in general, the performance and resource usage of Gnome + Nautilus vs. XFCE + rox, or, on other fronts, the resource usage of oowriter vs. abiword or oocalc vs. gnumeric.

Your example of a music player with a built-in file manager and RSS reader is, IMHO, not an example of bloat, if the application is made up of single, user-configurable components. (Which is why Emacs is not bloated.) An example of bloat is software that doesn't offer very much functionality, but still eats up lots of RAM and CPU time.