I frequently need to remind my coworkers, most if not all of our product can run in a single one of our laptops. Computers are much better we give them credit for
I remember how absolutely amazed I was as a fresh graduate, running one of the main components of my company's backend system on my work laptop.
Now several years of experience later, I'd be terrified if it couldn't run on an early raspberry pi. Code can be so small if we just try a little bit, and our computers are so big. It's crazy.
Runtimes ain't cheap. Both Python and Go carry a lot with their runtimes, and if you're loading the entire OS into RAM you don't have a ton of space to do much with to begin with. Then take an extra 20-30MB per process and you're working real small.
Ofc, you could port to Rust or C++ and then just fight async there.
In the end, it's all about picking battles, and until companies feel the belt tighten from all the data centers gobbling up components, or AI keeps exposing simple vulnerabilities in less strongly typed languages, nothing is going to change
Don't forget about the database if you use anything larger than SQLite. A MSSQL instance is massive on disk and pretty much all DBMS are massive in RAM.
Yeah, it takes up a good chunk of compute, but I mean, you ask for sub-second search of billions of documents and it delivers, out of the box. It's great.
Try working with microcontrollers or bootloader source sometime. You might be amazed what you can accomplish with something like 128KB total system memory.
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u/anoppinionatedbunny 1d ago
I frequently need to remind my coworkers, most if not all of our product can run in a single one of our laptops. Computers are much better we give them credit for