size matters

Fellow IBMer Bob Blainey recently posted a blog entry "Are you a Pakled?" which touched on software bloat. This is a subject near and dear to my heart, burned into me after spending a good five years or so in the embedded software space.

At the time, the devices that we were targeting would typically have something like 2MB ROM and 2MB RAM available. Think of the ROM like hard drive space, and the RAM is the memory in a computer today. We worked with devices that had less memory, sometimes, and near the end of my run, worked with devices that had much more memory available. But the 2/2 story was sort of the rule of thumb.

That's not a lot of space, so you worry about every byte. You worry about every new library that you need to add to your runtime. Not just in terms of it's disk footprint, which ate ROM, but the runtime footprint, which ate RAM. There were always hilarious situations where we'd be talking to product groups with no embedded experience, where they'd die laughing when we told them their library had to fit in 10K bytes; or it would be us laughing when they told us their runtime only required 1MB of RAM.

If you enjoy the "solving puzzles" aspect of software development, this is just an additional challenge on top of all the other challenges, which made it, for me, a terribly fun working experience.

You can imagine the "sticker shock" that hit me, when my first position after leaving the embedded world, involved J2EE. Whoa. And the sticker shock continues to this day, in every new piece of work I'm involved in. But it's not just me; most of my colleagues back in the embedded days seem to experience this sticker shock in their day-to-day jobs, which is something that I think most developers just don't think very much about. Like the kid in "The Sixth Sense", we see bloat - everywhere.

It's heartening to see the resurgence in interest in embedded development, in places like the iPhone and Android, since I hope this means we'll be seeing a lot more folks taking an interest in software bloat.

Aside: the Pakleds, referenced in Bob's post, were one of the most memorable races for me in the Star Trek series, but I wasn't able to find any video clips from the show. I did find a little audio clip though; this is Riker asking a Pakled what they need.