tepples wrote:
For one thing, "contemporary available resources" can range down to an Atom netbook or an ARM tablet or smartphone. See
discussion about frustration with garbage collection overhead in web browsers on slow, RAM-starved mobile devices.
The server side of a popular web application may need to serve several customers per second on each server behind the load balancer. Or a game for a late-generation console or handheld game system may try to raise scene complexity compared to competitors' games.
Yes, as always there are applications which require lighter / optimized implementations. Doing this is a specialized skill, and it's not needed for most cases. The majority of people take the naive path, and either don't have a problem at all because their task is incomplex, or don't notice the poor performance of their stuff because it's not really an issue to them, and/or they don't care about how it runs on more limited platforms that they don't use themselves.
For example, the recently released Hate Plus visual novel game has horrendous performance, and it uses all available CPU on its thread at all times even though it is largely just static screens of text. It causes a mild annoyance for people playing it (lag between input and feedback, jerky transitions, etc.), and I suppose causes a waste of electricity, heats up my laptop and gets that fan going annoyingly loud, etc. but it doesn't make the game non-functional at all. All these things annoy me, and the issue is probably really easy to fix for a programmer who is specialized in optimization, but it's not enough of a problem that its author is going to solve it. I'm not trying to single out Hate Plus, it's just an example-- a great deal of indie games have very poor performance for what they do.
There have always been programs and games and websites that run slowly and use way too much memory. Yes, resources were a bit tighter in the past, but the result was just that people managed to accomplish less complicated things before they hit their performance barrier. There was never a good old days when people cared more about performance, that's always been specialized.