this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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It's more likely they are not incentivized to. When you are writing software for a living, typically there days the companies you work for prioritize delivery speed over everything else. If they prioritized memory constraints, software would use less memory.
When you are rewarded for features and delivery, you end up with shit like electron. Not to even begin talking about how a whole generation of developers learned to code for the web and never touch os level dev....
Well why would they prioritize memory constraints? It has literally no change to their bottom line.
Say you're paying an engineer 100k a year. Reasonable cost in a western country, US based would be more like 200k+ when taxes and everything are involved. Tell him to spend 20% of his time optimizing memory usage.
Now how much money are you spending to increase your userbase by maybe 0.01% (there can't be that many people who'd uninstall software they need just because it uses more RAM than they'd like)? And that's for every engineer you tell to spend time optimizing.
Memory consumption only becomes important to the authors of the software when it's on the backend and you're serving so many users that your annual server costs get into millions, at which point you can save enough money that optimization is starting to be worth it.
It sucks, but it is what it is. For everyone to start building super optimized software again, we'd all first have to move to 512 MB Pentium 4 machines so using more memory would actually mean lost revenue via lost customers.