Yes, RAM was cheap. Yes, RAM is fast. Yes, assets are bigger because 4K. But if you load a 1MB executable and a 100MB executable into RAM, one will be faster and it doesn’t take a computer scientist to tell you which one.
I hesitate to call it lazy programming because it’s really just business pushing for the wrong results. The old chestnut of fast/good/cheap.
Bigger is not always slower, a CRC32 tool with a pre-computed table will be bigger but faster. And executables don’t “run from RAM”, this is not how virtual memory and file-backed mappings work.
Yes, RAM was cheap. Yes, RAM is fast. Yes, assets are bigger because 4K. But if you load a 1MB executable and a 100MB executable into RAM, one will be faster and it doesn’t take a computer scientist to tell you which one.
I hesitate to call it lazy programming because it’s really just business pushing for the wrong results. The old chestnut of fast/good/cheap.
The size tells me nothing. Smaller isn’t necessarily better, even if it is more efficient. Which smaller doesn’t mean either.
Bigger is not always slower, a CRC32 tool with a pre-computed table will be bigger but faster. And executables don’t “run from RAM”, this is not how virtual memory and file-backed mappings work.