There is a prevailing view that PC software is becoming bloated which, although true to an extent, is not as due to poor programming as you might think. Spectrums use 1Bpp graphics, beeper or AY code to produce sound etc - none of which is really viable on a PC as things are these days. 32Bpp graphics, high resolution textures, intricate control routines for moveable objects (such as enemies etc) and enormous, detailed level designs not to mention the fact the nearly everything is now 3D accounts for most of the bloat in games these days.llewelyn wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2019 3:14 pm Hey Dunny? Please excuse my probable idiocy but why did you say zack4mac's comment about the state of PC software was idiotic?
I'm constantly annoyed by bloatware. The difference in functionality versus size came up yesterday when I went looking for an RTF to HTML conversion utility. Some of them were several megs in size, the one I eventually chose was around 700k and works just fine (not sure if I got that size right but there was a huge difference between the various examples)
Poor programming (or at least a poor choice of tools) does have an impact - your RTF->HTML converters could probably done in raw C in just a couple of Kb - if you don't want to handle things like Unicode, and only a small subset of the RTF standard for example. Add to this that the author might be using a scripted language with included runtime libraries embedded means that you quickly bloat to MBs. Of course a 32bit architecture may mean a 4x bloat in code size alone, double that for 64bit possibly. So 700Kb is considered a pretty light application nowadays.
As a quick example, take my own SpecBAS. The executable is 16MB in size! But that's including the interpreter, the editor, all the runtime code for the myriad routines you might or might use. And then there's debug information. Without the debug info, it's 5MB. And it ain't gonna be any smaller. Why? Despite looking retro, SpecBAS runs 32bpp graphics with alpha blending and is not hardware accelerated aside from actually getting the graphics on the screen. The default font is 64KB as opposed to the same font occupying 767 bytes on the Speccy - the font is 32bit. There's masses of tables used to get things done quicker than you could on a Speccy. And of course, it's a win32/64 executable built with a modern compiler so there's runtime support libs built-in.
I'd love to get things down to less than a meg, but it's not gonna happen. And never will anymore, aside from demo coding contests where really small stuff can be built but is useless for anything other than showing off an effect.
I might have been a tad insulting back there, but you tend to get really tired of these people that can't code on modern platforms complaining that all their bytes have gone missing and you could do so much more with 16Kb back then.
Now back to your scheduled chess shenanigans.