November 4, 2025
When your calculator eats Win95
Some software bloat is OK
Dev feud erupts: “Good enough” vs “Stop the bloat”
TLDR: The piece says some modern “bloat” is a fair trade for speed and safer software, even if a calculator now eats more memory than 90s Windows. Comments erupt: one side defends pragmatic tradeoffs, another slams lazy choices and dependency overload, while pragmatists say fix obvious bottlenecks first.
The article argues some software bloat is a fair trade—modern apps juggle speed, safety, and developer sanity—then drops jaw-droppers like “Windows 11 Calculator munches more memory than all of Windows 95” and a 54KB image outweighing the original Mario game. Cue fireworks. The crowd split fast: enterprise folks like Cthulhu_ waved the “good enough” flag, saying teams pick tools that ship faster and meet real-world needs; meanwhile the anti-bloat brigade rallied around the classic Knuth quote, accusing devs of using “premature optimization is the root of all evil” as a shield to avoid thinking about efficiency at all. SurceBeats roasted the habit of grabbing Electron for tiny apps and pulling 200 packages for simple tasks—aka complexity debt that bites later. Pragmatist liampulles cut through with a fix-your-bottlenecks vibe: fewer database calls, faster results, even if your language runs slower. The thread also flared with meta-drama: InMice complained about spammy Opera redirects on the site, sparking jokes that the bloat starts right on the page. People dropped memes about a calculator needing a meal plan and Mario getting out-sized by a screenshot. The piece also warns that dependency piles become security risk magnets, linking to an npm supply chain attack.
Key Points
- •Modern hardware has reduced emphasis on software efficiency, shifting focus to developer productivity and maintainability.
- •Historically, tight resource constraints led to low-level programming in machine code and assembly.
- •Examples illustrate growth in resource use: Windows 11 Calculator uses over 30 MiB RAM vs Windows 95 operating with 4 MiB.
- •Super Mario Bros. (31–40 KiB, 2 KiB RAM) contrasted with a 54 KiB lossless WebP image to show size inflation.
- •The article attributes bloat to both legitimate tradeoffs and harmful practices like excessive dependencies, poor architecture, and container overhead.