If your backlog is full of feature requests you will add features.
If your backlog is full of tasks to reduce memory usage, speed up areas etc., then that is what you will do.
Most programmers will have no choice whatsoever.
"Programmers" don't make this decision, the product owner does.
With LLMs, it's faster to ship even in a more verbose language like Go or Rust.
If you're working on SAP or Salesforce, the language decisions are already made for you. If you're integrating with an existing Electron runtime, then you'll be using something in the JS family, like it or not.
Not solely. The business will have reasons to stay on a mainstream language, for example because
- it offers better guarantees for hiring maintainers in the future
- it has a higher likelihood that security issues will be fixed rapidly for free
- LLMs are better at maintaining code written in it
Even bus-factor comes into it.
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.
Its how software is built now in these palces.
From what I’ve seen of GitHub and AWS this year the answer is no. That’s despite me being bullish on LLMs and finding them highly productive.
in aws, some of the core bedrock services have been replaced with the new serving architecture. that thing was written basically with LLMs.
mind you, guy's a distinguished engineer, his team was basically all principals, but you can do it and some of the new teams are copying the style (though with less success, due to lack of technical skill).
We do stupid stuff as a stopgap to meet a deadline and then stupid stuff stays until it starts being a problem.
That should be one of those Tech culture “laws.”
I suspect that the dependapocalyse is a significant factor. When every part of an operation has multiple context rebuilds, and resources are not shared across module boundaries, you get inefficient behavior.
But I’m skeptical that there’s a will to rethink that.
Shipping is very important, sometimes more important than what you ship :)
I have known a lot of extremely talented developers, some with more technical skill than me, that simply failed at their job because they couldn’t come to terms with the fact that their job isn’t to produce the most perfect code possible for the problem.
The root of the problem is much more deeply ingrained in our economic system.
Google has already downgraded memory for their upcoming Pixel 11 while at the same time imposing local running models as a first-class feature. Both decreasing the memory pool and increasing the demands on it.
The key is that they own the full stack (hardware and software) and can demand the OS be more efficient, along with perhaps forcing that goal on app developers as well via tightened background limits etc.
The problem is that things go quickly in the other direction between these sprints.
This isn't where memory goes or real-world speed comes from. For most applications, it's abstractions like React running in electron that hurt performance. There are also richer resources backing parts of apps--higher resolutions, better quality, higher framerates.
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).
hardware costs must come down or every consumer segment is going to be renting, not owning, everything.
Is this not exactly what companies want
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.
If we can insert "some" then Yes.
> use of more advanced algorithms and data structures that use less memory?
I don't think so.
At least at work there is a push to decrease memory usage but the way I've seen it playing out is not using some O(N) data structure instead of O(N lg(N)) per-say but instead replacing `int[]` with `byte[]` or in-lining some fields to remove some indirection costs.
In specific sectors I do think we will see more optimization. If you're working on cloud compute or AI training / large scale data processing, there will be a big focus on optimization as prices are very large at that scale and shortages have a bigger effect.
Also in gaming I think the next cycle will be different. Big game studios used to push for the best possible graphics that might require the newest consoles or high end gaming computers, but the next releases might not be as much of an upgrade. The next gen of consoles or graphics cards themselves might be delayed, or be less powerful, or be too expensive and flop, as chip manufacturing companies continue focus on more lucrative markets and leave average consumers behind.
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.
The whole Electron “ship a browser for each app” ideology will die first.
Most games are written for the 3% who can afford a luxury gaming PC. That's how the market is working for a while now.
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.
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.
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."
(Just refactored an app to do this. 60k lines to 20k)
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.
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.
Who’s going to tell them?
They're suggesting that instead, consumers will just be forced to pay more for inefficient SaaS products being run on more expensive infrastructure.
Computer: Rewrite this python code in Go. Make it memory efficient.
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.
Those that didn't still won't
Yes. No. Yes.
I've worked in gamedev, helping ship code that ran on consoles. Nice fixed hardware targets. You OOM, you crash. We crashed a lot, and cut and saved and optimized and explicitly invoked the garbage collector twice on level transitions, because a single full scripting language GC doesn't work when finalizers must run to deref C++ objects to unroot script objects, and committed other horrific hacks.
The memory shortage may eventually impact fixed targets like this. Or the minspec publishers will swallow for fuzzier targets like "PC". But it takes awhile for new targets to roll out, and for newly bought PCs to make a significant dent on total percentage of PC ownership. Steam Machine's about to release with 16+8GB and while price and market saturation may be affected by the memory shortage, I'd be suprised if the actual spec changed.
> Maybe there will even be more interest in the invention and use of more advanced algorithms
Not for typical gamedev IMO. There the focus will be more on "reduce the amount of content loaded in memory simultaniously". That means less detail, smaller scale, or less variation. Going from 4096x4096 to 2048x2048 textures quarters your texture memory usage. The surface of meshes also has some square density nonsense going on. Basic animation tends to scale with bone count and keyframes, which are more linear, although shape keys are more per-vertex nonsense.
And of course, reusing the same mesh or texture multiple times doesn't use more memory, just more memory bandwidth.
Audio is more a factor of "how many sound effects (and variants) do we need preloaded just in case there's suddenly an event that triggers them".
These are the big ticket items for memory use and advanced algorithms don't help much. Rather, the algorithms help stretch whatever amount of memory you do have to provide the best amount of quality you can, and the small constant shift in total memory availability doesn't change the calculus for how important that is very much (which depending on the game ranges from "unimportant, everything fits in memory easily" to "critical, we're doing open world streaming and we've got terrabytes of raw data already, 16 vs 64GB of memory doesn't change that much")
> and data structures that use less memory?
Some bit packing type stuff comes up for smaller logical data structures in gamedev, and that can be useful for saving memory bandwidth, but I'm skeptical of how critical it is for total memory usage outside of the occasional Factorio.
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...
“The new MacBook only has 8 gigs of sheep - we need to go resource-lean!!1!”
Unless that changes we won't see any spike in optimization
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.
> Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?
But most 'programmers' are just Python programmers and not real programmers.
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.
The hackers doing the drone software in Ukraine will go to enormous lengths to get something onto Jetson Orin, but once it needs Thor? New cost model.
I think what the parent might be asking is whether the cost of DRAM will be passed along to the most powerless actor in the system, and that depends on whether it's a real competition (war, HFT) or a pillow fight between frenemies (consumer Internet, too big to fail AI lab).
Us liberals have this quaint idea that good referees make capitalism an adversarial contest instead of a rolodex contest, but that idea is out of fashion at the moment.