So, lately, people have been making a big deal about green hardware – hardware that’s produced using environmentally friendly methods and uses as little power as possible.
But what about green software? You don’t really hear all that much about that. And, all this green movement right now is, make slower hardware, and expect users to put up with it. It works because hardware arguably passed the “fast enough” point in the past few years.
However, for a lot of tasks, we arguably should’ve passed the fast enough point 10 or 15 years ago. Word processing and web browsing are not rocket science, for two examples. Operating systems (all of them, yes, I’m even looking at you, modern Linux distributions) are bloated. Let’s not even talk about Adobe’s stuff.
Why isn’t there an equivalent green software movement? Improve compilers, strip out bloat, don’t pull the “you’ve got the CPU power, don’t worry about optimization” card. That way, we can either use slower CPUs and have quite good performance, or our current CPUs and run them at partial load (resulting in less power consumption) or have mindblowing performance.
I know, I know, that’d require actual work.
But, just a thought.