Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Until prices hit the large hyperscalers, I don't think most people are going to make significant changes. You might see a small set of open source projects related to self hosting put in an effort, but in general, I don't think so.
Some big-tech orgs (that have their own hardware) will take costs into account, but they already do that. The "optimization" is more likely to be business-optimizations; "this can be slower if it uses less memory", rather than inventing new stuff.
Note that I am excluding any of the big AI labs. They are definitely going to be working to figure out how to use less memory, but that's primarily not related to the direct cost.
by nrmitchi - For the people I work with, I'd say no to writing more efficient code, and maybe to using more advanced algorithms. I say maybe only because they'll just ask an LLM to make it more memory efficient. Which in theory will cause the LLM to choose a more advanced DS. But I don't have a lot of faith that the LLM will get said DS right all the time.
I work with dynamic language developers. Perl, React, Python and so on. Most currently don't care about memory usage. Some devs are actively wasteful. Usually in the name of code clarity or speed of delivery.
by peelle - I don't think we will in the HN snark sense of "this react site or electron app uses way too much memory". Those companies will continue to work in the same way, maybe even less efficiently as people chase modern UIs with extra animations or videos or effects, or with some AI code generation tacking on too many features or tech debt.
In specific sectors I do think we will see more optimization. If you're working on cloud compute or AI training / large scale data processing, there will be a big focus on optimization as prices are very large at that scale and shortages have a bigger effect.
Also in gaming I think the next cycle will be different. Big game studios used to push for the best possible graphics that might require the newest consoles or high end gaming computers, but the next releases might not be as much of an upgrade. The next gen of consoles or graphics cards themselves might be delayed, or be less powerful, or be too expensive and flop, as chip manufacturing companies continue focus on more lucrative markets and leave average consumers behind.
by naet - If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected.
If buyers can't afford the hardware anymore, the studios need to adjust. It's definitively possible to scale games down a lot. There are a few AAA games that were "dumbed down" for the Switch 1 (Hogwarts, cyberpunk, ...). And that's a really low-spec device.
There are two factors: existing gamers not able to afford upgrading. But also new gamers, that might only be able to afford much lower spec PCs than people who bought 2 years earlier.
Why games? Because there is a clear point where people stop buying games. Minimum hw specs are known before buying.
by andix - It's definitely possible, but I agree with many other commenters it probably will not happen.
I wrote an encrypted mesh networking library that runs on normal operating systems. A customer asked me if I could make it run on an ESP32 with 520 kiB of RAM. At first this seemed impossible, but it turned out that it was, and not even that hard. While the original library was not memory hungry at all for a desktop CPU, it still wasted space on unnecessarily large buffers. Cutting those out made the library run on an ESP32 while leaving plenty of room for an application.
Also, my first PC was a 200 MHz single-core 32-bit AMD k6 with 32 MiB of RAM. This ran a graphical OS with browsers, word processors, 3D games and so on. Nowadays you can get a CPU with more than that amount of RAM as just built-in cache.
So a good place to start optimizing code would be to actually get a "severely resource constrained" computer and start making your code work on it.
by gsliepen - Programmers will write more efficient algorithms if their employers tell them to trade time-to-market for hardware cost. Previously, it was trade hardware cost for time-to-market.
"Programmers" don't make this decision, the product owner does.
by jpollock - I don't believe so do for two reasons:
- everyone assumes their program / website is the only thing running at the machine at a given time, and dev machines are always more powerful than user machines
- it's not really lack of advanced data structures and algorithms that result in the bloat most of the time but the fact that programs and websites are delivered by large teams, there are dozens of submodules that are often loaded even when not needed, and doing it properly is hard to architect to without getting into big complexity and gnarly bugs waiting to happen when someone from other team modifies something and does not know full picture. So it's cheaper to just keep things the way they are to reduce complexity of architecture and fragility.
by jakub_g - Some programmers will write more efficient code. At my $dayjob (one of the big tech companies) we're already planning a major goal next year of optimizing server code to reduce RAM requirements, and this is directly in response to the crunch.
In practice I expect most optimizations will come from "stop doing stupid stuff" and not "use fancy advanced algorithms." But that's a cynical perspective so don't be cynical like me.
by cornstalks