To me an interesting question is why they bloat up. Is it all mindless waste or is there a tradeoff being made here?
Obviously, it’s because of how our society and culture is oriented. But I’d like to see that change.
Most customers want their immediate problem solved as cheaply as possible.
Unless you're in a market where customer's pay for craftsmanship, you will get undersold.
Well defined interfaces and good composition support the goals of the author of lean software.
They also happen to improve developer comprehension and reusability, both of which speed up software development in the long run.
Weird counter point to “buy more hardware”: I worked with a client who have some code they developed, it takes a dataset, run some calculation and returns the result. To speed up part of the calculation they use CUDA.
We help migrate they system from older physical hardware to AWS, pretty standard. They got more memory, more CPU cores and jumped three generations of Nvidia GPUs. The result was 10% speed increase, no where near what hardware alone should have yielded, so clearly in this case there’s something in code that prevent the hardware from being fully utilised.
Eg, a 320x200x8 display has 64000 bytes of memory. A 4Kx32 bit display has 33177600 bytes of memory. That's 518 more times memory used just for a single screen. Take into account that these days we have compositors and each window is present in memory on its own, before it's composed into the result, and it's even worse.
We also work on far bigger projects. The project I work on as a hobby has 400K lines of C++. Imagine the amount of processing an IDE needs to do to parse all of that and provide its various convenient functions. And of course a good chunk of that is in RAM, because that's far too much stuff to parse everything every time.
Old tools also don't really cut it anymore. If I try running ctags on it, it comes up with a 14GB tags file. I don't think it handles it quite right.
There's no need to use high-performance, but difficult to develop languages (c, c++). There's no need to be conscious of data structure choices. There's no need to profile code, etc.
Optimizing code can be a deep rabbit hole. If you remember a few months ago, some random person dug into why GTA Online was taking longer each day to load. The reason turned out to be a string parsing inefficiency in the strlen method, a core library. But it only manifested itself in certain situations.
So the only exposure most students get is not to do it. I doubt any CS programs make performance analysis or optimization a requirement. Just buy a faster system.