Can I code on a Raspberry Pi?
From Raspberry Pi Dreams to Coding Nightmares

I recently migrated all my native Java executables from a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 to my home server. One machine to rule them all. With the Pi now free, I dared to ask: "Could it serve as a desktop?"
Spoiler: No. Not even close.

After soldering proper connectors (because micro USB is now the tech version of a fossil), I powered it up. Not to code. Just to open a browser.

It failed. Spectacularly.

Apparently, launching a modern browser now requires a minimum of 1GB RAM and the will of a dying star. Dear frontend framework fans: maybe stop shipping entire JS ecosystems just to render a button. You're not curing cancer. Less is more.

Irony? The Pi still serves as a server, solid, silent, reliable. But opening a single webpage? That’s where it draws the line. My other Pi models are bulkier veterans. They used to work as desktop machines. Now? They drown in memory and I/O demands like kittens in a tsunami of bloated software.

Speaking of I/O, let’s talk coding:
Tools like Gradle will kill your SD card faster than you will to debug XML.
IDE's and all the modern crap survives long enough to say goodbye as they are bloatware, not software. If I had time, I would rewrite all the tools.

I tried expensive SD cards. They all broke. Modern tools have no mercy.
And the shiny new Raspberry Pi 500? Still runs off an SD card.
Beautiful concept. Terrible choice for our terrible software performance.

Yet, I admire it. The idea that a computer fits in a keyboard, Keyboard computers are cyberpunk incarnate.
Imagine cramming a MacBook Air's logic board into a mechanical shell.
No fan. No nonsense. Just cool, portable silicon nirvana and a clean desk everywhere.

If only our software wasn't a bloated mass of lazy abstractions, we could actually use these machines. But AI's coming for us and it was trained on this mess.

So here I am, dreaming of turning my old MacBook Air into a keyboard-only cyberdeck. Who needs a screen when you’ve got a home office? Who needs a webcam when your phone stalks you from five angles?

Apple take notes: Give us something like a Pi.

Building Perl 5 natively has been running for 2 days on OMAP1 w/32MB RAM, so I decided to look if there's something to optimize... It used to finish within a day. The compilation seems to proceed well, it's just slow because of swapping.

GCC 12.4 cc1 binary alone is around 22 megs. If I compile it with -Oz it shrinks almost 4 megs! On other binaries (like binutils) difference is not that big but still measurable. Going to check if this helps.

Every time I download a gigabyte-sized update for a software that solves one simple problem, I think the exact same thing: "The world is shipping far too much code..." #softwareBloat

Nice article by @bert_hubert: https://spectrum.ieee.org/lean-software-development

#GoogleChrome is about 40 million lines, which is about the same size as the #Linux kernel.

Nobody can read the #SourceCode of Chrome. Not alone, not as a team. A thousand people working for a decade couldn't read the entire thing.

And the computers that run the #code aren't much faster now than they were a decade ago. #SoftwareBloat #KoomeysLaw

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing #codebases
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/02/12/drowning_in_code/

macOS Sonoma is a 13.37GB download.

That’s 15.5 times larger than Arch Linux…

Over 6.5 times larger than EndeavourOS
Over 5 times larger than Garuda, Linux Mint, Feren OS, Pop!_OS, Fedora, & Zorin
Over 3 times larger than Ubuntu, Manjaro & Debian

Over 2.4 times larger than…WINDOWS 11‽

Are you feeling okay, Tim Apple?

The Power Macintosh 6500’s software bundle sure loaded a lot of extensions

#apple #macintosh #powermacintosh
#retrocomputing #vintagemac
#softwarebloat