Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

Unless users complain it’s not going to happen. Somehow SPA (single page app) consume memory as much as operating system.

I've dumped python for anything that doesn't involve scipy / pytorch in favor of go. So yes, I'm having my llm's output go now which is generally more memory efficient than python.

Lad, modern day "programmers" don't even know what memory is. You'll be lucky to find any "software engineer" who can even tell you what a pointer is.

Programmers won't, but LLMs will.

I don't think at this point in history limitations drive the the way we do things, abundance does.

I don't think we will in the HN snark sense of "this react site or electron app uses way too much memory". Those companies will continue to work in the same way, maybe even less efficiently as people chase modern UIs with extra animations or videos or effects, or with some AI code generation tacking on too many features or tech debt.

In specific sectors I do think we will see more optimization. If you're working on cloud compute or AI training / large scale data processing, there will be a big focus on optimization as prices are very large at that scale and shortages have a bigger effect.

Also in gaming I think the next cycle will be different. Big game studios used to push for the best possible graphics that might require the newest consoles or high end gaming computers, but the next releases might not be as much of an upgrade. The next gen of consoles or graphics cards themselves might be delayed, or be less powerful, or be too expensive and flop, as chip manufacturing companies continue focus on more lucrative markets and leave average consumers behind.

Some programmers will write more efficient code. At my $dayjob (one of the big tech companies) we're already planning a major goal next year of optimizing server code to reduce RAM requirements, and this is directly in response to the crunch.

In practice I expect most optimizations will come from "stop doing stupid stuff" and not "use fancy advanced algorithms." But that's a cynical perspective so don't be cynical like me.

If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected.

If buyers can't afford the hardware anymore, the studios need to adjust. It's definitively possible to scale games down a lot. There are a few AAA games that were "dumbed down" for the Switch 1 (Hogwarts, cyberpunk, ...). And that's a really low-spec device.

There are two factors: existing gamers not able to afford upgrading. But also new gamers, that might only be able to afford much lower spec PCs than people who bought 2 years earlier.

Why games? Because there is a clear point where people stop buying games. Minimum hw specs are known before buying.

Until prices hit the large hyperscalers, I don't think most people are going to make significant changes. You might see a small set of open source projects related to self hosting put in an effort, but in general, I don't think so.

Some big-tech orgs (that have their own hardware) will take costs into account, but they already do that. The "optimization" is more likely to be business-optimizations; "this can be slower if it uses less memory", rather than inventing new stuff.

Note that I am excluding any of the big AI labs. They are definitely going to be working to figure out how to use less memory, but that's primarily not related to the direct cost.

Programmers might write more efficient code if the performance was unacceptable on their own laptops, but even in the not-flush-with-cash companies I've worked all my career, it's been easy for me to always have a dev laptop with twice as much RAM as most consumers have. I'm presently working on a laptop with 64GB, and we don't even use any local AI models. If a PE company is willing to spec dev laptops like this, even in the memory shortage, then I assume the memory pressure will never hit developers.

So, this carefree attitude directly shapes all code that runs client-side (JS + native apps) since the only impact on the company is whatever happens on the dev's laptop. The rest of the impact is "free" since it's paid (in either money or in misery) by customers.

For server side, I also highly doubt it, as being more memory efficient on the server side has always had a benefit to the company who pays the bill. The only things that may change may be the relative cost, but if management comes and says "AWS bill going up, help?" devs will say "OK, we can find ways to save RAM, but the team won't be doing any new features or fixing any customer-facing bugs during that time" and management will say "Okie dokie, we'll just pay the bigger bill then."

For this incentive to exist, the app needs to be such an obvious memory hog that users start identifying it as the source of the problem.

Even then, a lot is required for most businesses to prioritize this (presumably) temporary issue at the cost of things like: participation in the AI race, other features, bug fixes, new markets etc.

Heck, sometimes software is so inefficient that it costs developer and tester productivity but a fix is not prioritized for years.

I was thinking about this recently. If you discount web/electron bloat, actually the memory bloat of software isn't hugely terrible.

I still often notice that servers on Linux use <1GB of RAM even with relatively high use. I don't think that's really changed massively in 20 years.

One can certainly wish, but I am inclined to believe that RAM use isn’t just about sloppy programmers. I think it is, to a significant degree, about the kinds of problems we solve now that we have more RAM.

And not all exorbitant RAM use is about sloppiness. Sometimes you can trade more RAM use for lower complexity. Bugs and development time were expensive. RAM was not. So sometimes there is calculation rather than sloppiness behind certain types of heavy RAM use.

Algorithms and data structures aren't the problem, bundling Chromium to make a chat app is the problem.

I think Rust's rise in popularity will probably lead to some benefits.

Games will probably get more efficient but they're easier to scale down to the memory that's available.

> will programmers write

Who’s going to tell them?

I doubt many of the newer generation ever even tried. Maybe they had a course at uni where they did some C or Assembly, but that's probably the extend of it. So no, I don't think so lol.

No. The cost of one programmer’s hour of work compared to the increase in price of RAM is not very big. One is a variable cost one is fixed.

The memory shortage is really for these insane memory requirements for LLMs.

A web browser and the basic mobile app will be fine.

The iPhone 17 Pro has the most RAM and it's only 12GB. Hell the iPhone 16 Pro only had 8 GB. The vast majority of consumer cases don't need it. I doubt Apple and other manufacturers will go beyond that to keep prices down.

There's hope for the extinction of Electron based apps.

Only if people start buying computers with less memory, if they just buy fewer computers it doesn’t seem worhwhile.

Depends. I can certainly offer to rewrite my old code that contributed to the memory shortage, for a price.

A few will write low level code that will make all code behave more memory efficiently.

Memory? Doubt it.

But I’m hopefully optimistic that we’ll see a renewed emphasis on speed and responsiveness, since users do notice that despite most products ignoring it.

If the producers see a long term demand for memory they will meet the challenge and produce enough to bring prices down.

Economics will invariably alleviate the memory crunch. It just takes long and requires a huge upfront CapEx.

They have been burned in the past and are hesitant to over invest, worried that the bubble might burst.

I expect high prices to stick around for a while, but I would be surprised if this was permanent.

Which means to me, that price pressure probably won't be the driving force for writing more memory efficient software.

For those who want, I expect AI to make it easier to do that, assuming it's done right, i.e. not vibe coding it.

If you have a subscription to The Economist, I recommend listening to this Money Talks podcast. They talk about the shortage and the economics behind it.

Can anything stop South Korea’s bull run?

https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2026/05/21/can-anything-s...

I don't see the trend reversing, but if we're lucky, perhaps a freeze. Won't get more efficient but may not get worse.

No. Customers will pay more across all markets.

Will you stop using docker to deploy a simple application? No? Didn't think so.

claude code and friends will make it much easier to rewrite python/js/$memory-hungry code in rust.

Of course not. Why would they? The software nowadays is mostly written for people who already own computers with RAM already installed. Yeah, they probably won't upgrade for the next couple of years, so what?

Besides, have you heard about "virtual memory" and "swapping"? Nowadays, SSDs (and especially NVMe) are quite fast, so thrashing is much less of an issue.

No.

No, even at these high memory prices it's cheaper to produce code as fast as possible than to spend the time to optimize it for efficiency. It has always been the case that hardware improves at a faster pace than software. So what will happen is that we will get tech improvements in hardware that will reduce its price faster than we can write software to fully take advantage of the hardware. The current bottle neck that's causing the spike in memory prices will subside relatively soon so we'll be in better shape before we know it.

Will they? I don't know. Should they? Yes. If AI is so great, we should use it to optimize. Rewrite all the bloat into lean efficient systems...

currently porting code from Go to Rust primarily motivated by memory efficiency gains

AI (like alcohol) is the cause-of and solution-to all our problems.

Computer: Rewrite this python code in Go. Make it memory efficient.

> Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

If we can insert "some" then Yes.

> use of more advanced algorithms and data structures that use less memory?

I don't think so.

At least at work there is a push to decrease memory usage but the way I've seen it playing out is not using some O(N) data structure instead of O(N lg(N)) per-say but instead replacing `int[]` with `byte[]` or in-lining some fields to remove some indirection costs.

Programmers will write more efficient algorithms if their employers tell them to trade time-to-market for hardware cost. Previously, it was trade hardware cost for time-to-market.

"Programmers" don't make this decision, the product owner does.

8Gb laptops are about the only tech still selling. Exec's better think long and hard about that.

Are there promotion metrics tied to app performance? Or are they tied to deliverables?

Unless that changes we won't see any spike in optimization

This is sadly a Betteridge's Law of Headlines situation.

Yes. Let's hope bloated frameworks like react, angular and vue with their dreaded hydration and ssr approaches will be replaced with pure clientside applications with stateless servers with small data apis only. That alone will reduce zeptibytes of memory requirements in the world.

Are you joking? If anything, they'll use even more memory by shoving 8B LLMs in every single app.

It could certainly be used as a way for some to sell performance improvements up the food chain, if they’re struggling to.

“The new MacBook only has 8 gigs of sheep - we need to go resource-lean!!1!”

Let me get this straight. We have a memory shortage due to AI slop which is not really efficient and to solve that problem we need to stop the AI slop and hand write the code.

those that did before still will.

Those that didn't still won't

> Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

Yes. No. Yes.

I've worked in gamedev, helping ship code that ran on consoles. Nice fixed hardware targets. You OOM, you crash. We crashed a lot, and cut and saved and optimized and explicitly invoked the garbage collector twice on level transitions, because a single full scripting language GC doesn't work when finalizers must run to deref C++ objects to unroot script objects, and committed other horrific hacks.

The memory shortage may eventually impact fixed targets like this. Or the minspec publishers will swallow for fuzzier targets like "PC". But it takes awhile for new targets to roll out, and for newly bought PCs to make a significant dent on total percentage of PC ownership. Steam Machine's about to release with 16+8GB and while price and market saturation may be affected by the memory shortage, I'd be suprised if the actual spec changed.

> Maybe there will even be more interest in the invention and use of more advanced algorithms

Not for typical gamedev IMO. There the focus will be more on "reduce the amount of content loaded in memory simultaniously". That means less detail, smaller scale, or less variation. Going from 4096x4096 to 2048x2048 textures quarters your texture memory usage. The surface of meshes also has some square density nonsense going on. Basic animation tends to scale with bone count and keyframes, which are more linear, although shape keys are more per-vertex nonsense.

And of course, reusing the same mesh or texture multiple times doesn't use more memory, just more memory bandwidth.

Audio is more a factor of "how many sound effects (and variants) do we need preloaded just in case there's suddenly an event that triggers them".

These are the big ticket items for memory use and advanced algorithms don't help much. Rather, the algorithms help stretch whatever amount of memory you do have to provide the best amount of quality you can, and the small constant shift in total memory availability doesn't change the calculus for how important that is very much (which depending on the game ranges from "unimportant, everything fits in memory easily" to "critical, we're doing open world streaming and we've got terrabytes of raw data already, 16 vs 64GB of memory doesn't change that much")

> and data structures that use less memory?

Some bit packing type stuff comes up for smaller logical data structures in gamedev, and that can be useful for saving memory bandwidth, but I'm skeptical of how critical it is for total memory usage outside of the occasional Factorio.

Depends entirely on how competitive / adversarial the market segment is. And there are wild nonlinearities, just as you care a lot whether or not something fits in an 8-way set associative L1d but once you're too big or bank conflicted to make it the cost model drops sharply until you're about to spill the L2.

The hackers doing the drone software in Ukraine will go to enormous lengths to get something onto Jetson Orin, but once it needs Thor? New cost model.

I think what the parent might be asking is whether the cost of DRAM will be passed along to the most powerless actor in the system, and that depends on whether it's a real competition (war, HFT) or a pillow fight between frenemies (consumer Internet, too big to fail AI lab).

Us liberals have this quaint idea that good referees make capitalism an adversarial contest instead of a rolodex contest, but that idea is out of fashion at the moment.