Re: Downwardly Scalable Systems

On Sun, 14 Apr 2024, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> wrote or quoted:

programming languages that "scale down".

>
 David forgot to tell use what it means for a programming language
 to "scale down".

>
Wasn't that in the second paragraph?
>
"Good systems should be able to scale down as well as up. They
should run on slower computers that don't have as much memory or
disk storage as the latest models. Likewise, from the human point
of view, downwardly scalable systems should also be small enough to
learn and use without being an expert programmer." ...
>
I read it mainly out of interest in his ideas for the first aspect
with running on slower computers, but it turns out he doesn't
really discuss that at all. They tend to be contradictory goals, so
without proposing a way to unify them it makes that aspect purely
aspirational.
>
In fact in terms of memory and disk storage GCC keeps going
backwards that even for C/C++. Compiling large C/C++ programs with
-Os in ever newer GCC versions keeps producing ever bigger binaries
for unchanged code. Of course other compilers are available and I'm
not sure how other popular ones compare.

Why do they go backwards? I mean larger binaries must come with some benefit right?