Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:24:06 -0800, Walter Bright wrote: > dsimcha wrote: >> Vote++. I'm convinced that there's just a subset of programmers out >> there that will not use any high-level programming model, no matter how >> much easier it makes life, unless they're convinced it has **zero** >> overhead compared to the crufty old C way. Not negligible overhead, >> not practically insignificant overhead for their use case, not zero >> overhead in terms of whatever their most constrained resource is but >> nonzero overhead in terms of other resources, but zero overhead, >> period. >> >> Then there are those who won't make any tradeoff in terms of safety, >> encapsulation, readability, modularity, maintainability, etc., even if >> it means their program runs 15x slower. Why can't more programmers >> take a more pragmatic attitude towards efficiency (among other things)? >> Yes, noone wants to just gratuitously squander massive resources, but >> is a few hundred kilobytes (fine, even a few megabytes, given how cheap >> bandwidth and storage are nowadays) larger binary really going to make >> or break your app, especially if you get it working faster and/or with >> less bugs than you would have using some cruftier, older, lower level >> language that produces smaller binaries? > > > I agree that a lot of the concerns are based on obsolete notions. First > off, I just bought another terabyte drive for $90. The first hard drive > I bought was $600 for 10Mb. A couple years earlier I used a 10Mb drive > that cost $5000. If I look at what eats space on my lovely terabyte > drive, it ain't executables. It's music and pictures. I'd be very > surprised if I had a whole CD's worth of exe files.
A 1 Tb spinning hard disk doesn't represent the current state-of-the-art. I have Intel SSD disks are those are damn expensive if you e.g. start to build a safe RAID 1+0 setup. Instead of 1000 GB the same price SSD comes with 8..16 GB. Suddenly application size starts to matter. For instance, my root partition seems to contain 9 GB worth of files and I've only installed a quite minimal graphical Linux environment to write some modern end-user applications.
