Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage? Maybe there will even be more interest in the invention and use of more advanced algorithms and data structures that use less memory? |
Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage? Maybe there will even be more interest in the invention and use of more advanced algorithms and data structures that use less memory? |
Abundance and limitations are a bit of ying/yang phenomena in terms of driving things, you don't have one without the other.
Igor Stravinsky: "Constraint drives creativity"
(I also don't see Amdahl's Law --which is fundamentally about limitations -- going away any time soon.)
I do agree that there are compounding abundancies present.
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.
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.
Recently I booted up Insurgency: Sandstorm. With a 5800X and an Intel Arc B580 at 1080p and high graphics, the game runs at around 200 FPS. Meanwhile, pretty much any modern UE5 title (with the exception of Ready or Not and Split Fiction, from what I've seen) runs horribly - the interesting thing is that no matter how much you tweak the .ini files or change the graphics settings you can't get something like STALKER 2 or The Forever Winter or Borderlands 4 to run as well as UE4 with the graphics similar to those old games. Instead you get something that runs at like 10% of the render resolution and still doesn't get 60 FPS (I'm not exaggerating, literally the performance I got in The Forever Winter).
There's no good technical reason for things to be that way (Unity still exists, and the games made in it struggle less) other than the devs or the higher ups choosing higher fidelity but more expensive rendering technologies and using upscaling and framegen not as something that helps laptops or when you need the spare GPU capacity (e.g. encoding a video recording of the game), but rather as something that's supposed to be used to even get to 60 FPS in the first place.
I don't know what needs to change for things to get better.
I also don't see anyone particularly caring about regular software, Electron et al are just too convenient to develop in (having to create per-platform UIs sucks in already-overworked teams).
Spot on.
Now with LLMs and desktop app libraries such as Tauri, there is little excuse in choosing Electron to build memory hungry apps other than laziness.
So, this carefree attitude directly shapes all code that runs client-side (JS + native apps) since the only impact on the company is whatever happens on the dev's laptop. The rest of the impact is "free" since it's paid (in either money or in misery) by customers.
For server side, I also highly doubt it, as being more memory efficient on the server side has always had a benefit to the company who pays the bill. The only things that may change may be the relative cost, but if management comes and says "AWS bill going up, help?" devs will say "OK, we can find ways to save RAM, but the team won't be doing any new features or fixing any customer-facing bugs during that time" and management will say "Okie dokie, we'll just pay the bigger bill then."
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.
Even then, a lot is required for most businesses to prioritize this (presumably) temporary issue at the cost of things like: participation in the AI race, other features, bug fixes, new markets etc.
Heck, sometimes software is so inefficient that it costs developer and tester productivity but a fix is not prioritized for years.
For cloud apps where the costs are largely hidden from users, the user has no way of doing that analysis. I agree with the second part of what you said, though: I expect businesses to just raise their prices in those cases rather than systematically focus on actual difficult engineering problems.
I still often notice that servers on Linux use <1GB of RAM even with relatively high use. I don't think that's really changed massively in 20 years.
And not all exorbitant RAM use is about sloppiness. Sometimes you can trade more RAM use for lower complexity. Bugs and development time were expensive. RAM was not. So sometimes there is calculation rather than sloppiness behind certain types of heavy RAM use.
I think Rust's rise in popularity will probably lead to some benefits.
Games will probably get more efficient but they're easier to scale down to the memory that's available.
Precisely. And all that extra resource wastage is completely free! (paid by your customers).
Perhaps if there were any big software companies who were so iconoclastic as to write fast software and avoid wasteful patterns like using Electron, pressure to do better could be felt, but every company that ships software[1] behaves the same so if anyone tries out competition due to performance beefs, they'll have no relief. They'll be forced to blame their hardware and upgrade it.
[1] Only exception of course is some indie developers. I don't know of any companies that have more than about 2 devs who haven't adopted the 'modern' approach, where we only fix performance issues that completely block using the app.
Who’s going to tell them?
A web browser and the basic mobile app will be fine.
The iPhone 17 Pro has the most RAM and it's only 12GB. Hell the iPhone 16 Pro only had 8 GB. The vast majority of consumer cases don't need it. I doubt Apple and other manufacturers will go beyond that to keep prices down.
But I’m hopefully optimistic that we’ll see a renewed emphasis on speed and responsiveness, since users do notice that despite most products ignoring it.
Economics will invariably alleviate the memory crunch. It just takes long and requires a huge upfront CapEx.
They have been burned in the past and are hesitant to over invest, worried that the bubble might burst.
I expect high prices to stick around for a while, but I would be surprised if this was permanent.
Which means to me, that price pressure probably won't be the driving force for writing more memory efficient software.
For those who want, I expect AI to make it easier to do that, assuming it's done right, i.e. not vibe coding it.
If you have a subscription to The Economist, I recommend listening to this Money Talks podcast. They talk about the shortage and the economics behind it.
Can anything stop South Korea’s bull run?
https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2026/05/21/can-anything-s...
“ The China card
Two Chinese chip makers—CXMT, the country’s top DRAM producer, and Yangtze Memory Technologies, which focuses on NAND storage—are growing fast and want to expand their global clientele. China is the closest thing to a quick fix for the chip shortage, but the solution is at best partial.
Yangtze Memory is building three new factories in China that would more than double its current capacity by the end of 2027, people familiar with the plans said. Meanwhile CXMT is seeking to raise $4 billion in an initial public offering in Shanghai, and it is building new factories. It said its revenue rose by more than 700% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, though it acknowledged that its products still trail those of the three industry leaders.”
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/why-the-memory-crunch-is-almost-imp...
They're suggesting that instead, consumers will just be forced to pay more for inefficient SaaS products being run on more expensive infrastructure.
Besides, have you heard about "virtual memory" and "swapping"? Nowadays, SSDs (and especially NVMe) are quite fast, so thrashing is much less of an issue.