My Nephew (Andrew) sent me a link to an Article published on ZDNET and I will save repeating the post here and instead go into some thoughts on that very article. The bottom line of that story was if a programmers is using a screaming fast system with lots of ram, will they just assume what they have wrote is fine yet the end program will struggle on more “real life” system?

Days of Old

In the days of 8-bit computers you had 64K (or less) of system memory, very low CPU and you had to write very tight code to get the most out of the system. The likes of the BBC Systems proved this with program’s such as Elite running on a very low powered device. As CPU Speed got faster and memory was not an issue any longer, program’s not only started to span many DVD’s but also ran very slow on anything but the best system.

Programming

When you are compiling code, it pays big fold to have the fastest and the best – the quicker you can test the build and see what it does, the better if time is money. Testing the end program though should be placed across many different types of machines, not everyone has the money to buy a Core i7 along with a top end graphics card.

A Case in point

I use Wirecast (Excellent Program by the way) and it runs like a dream harldy touching the side on either an 8 Core Mac Pro (which I do not own) or indeed a Core i7 (which I do). Now in this instance the programmers had no though of testing it on an ATI Graphic Card – only after extensive testing did they finally get a working version. I noticed that on AMD Machine, the program run very badly indeed and needed a lot of tweaking to stop the CPU hitting 100% (On a Dual Core 2Ghz in fact).

The case in point here is that programmers in this instance should have had access to both Nvidia and ATI and also a range of machines to see how badly it run on lower end machines. Not all the blame can be handed at the door of the company though -  some can be placed in ATI and AMD In fact.

Time = Money

The Bottom line for all of this is quite simply time is money for these programmers. While I could sit here shaving a few seconds per section by re-coding, they need to get the product out for mass sale and move onto the next thing. Quite often they fix one round of bugs and more come up (always the case). All I am saying is that in this day of super fact processors, cheap memory and even faster graphics card it is probably easier to code badly and put the minimum spec up then it is to waste money on tweaking the code.