Newbie question about text encoding

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 3:45 AM, alister
<alister.nospam.ware at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Feb 2015 03:12:16 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 3:00 AM, alister
>> <alister.nospam.ware at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>>> I think there is a case for bringing back the overlay file, or at least
>>> loading larger programs in sections only loading the routines as they
>>> are required could speed up the start time of many large applications.
>>> examples libre office, I rarely need the mail merge function, the word
>>> count and may other features that could be added into the running
>>> application on demand rather than all at once.
>>
>> Downside of that is twofold: firstly the complexity that I already
>> mentioned, and secondly you pay the startup cost on first usage. So you
>> might get into the program a bit faster, but as soon as you go to any
>> feature you didn't already hit this session, the program pauses for a
>> bit and loads it. Sometimes startup cost is the best time to do this
>> sort of thing.
>>
> If the modules are small enough this may not be noticeable but yes I do
> accept there may be delays on first usage.
>
> As to the complexity it has been my observation that as the memory
> footprint available to programmers has increase they have become less &
> less skilled at writing code.

Perhaps, but on the other hand, the skill of squeezing code into less
memory is being replaced by other skills. We can write code that takes
the simple/dumb approach, let it use an entire megabyte of memory, and
not care about the cost... and we can write that in an hour, instead
of spending a week fiddling with it. Reducing the development cycle
time means we can add all sorts of cool features to a program, all
while the original end user is still excited about it. (Of course, a
comparison between today's World Wide Web and that of the 1990s
suggests that these cool features aren't necessarily beneficial, but
still, we have the option of foregoing austerity.)

> Video editing suites are another that could be used as an example
> (perhaps more so, does the rendering engine need to be loaded until you
> start generating the output? a small delay here would be insignificant)

Hmm, I'm not sure that's actually a big deal, because your *data* will
dwarf the code. I can fire up sox and avconv, both fairly large
programs, and their code will all sit comfortably in memory; but then
they get to work on my data, and suddenly my hard disk is chewing
through 91GB of content. Breaking up avconv into a dozen pieces
wouldn't make a dent in 91GB.

ChrisA