The Lost Art of Software Optimization: What Demoscene Taught Us About Sustainability
I used to spend hours — sometimes days — squeezing every last byte out of code. Getting a program to run on hardware that “couldn’t possibly” handle it was genuinely thrilling. The demoscene was my inspiration: watching impossible visual effects rendered in 64 kilobytes or less. How did they do that? That mindset seems almost quaint now. Why optimize when you can just throw more hardware at the problem? Why care about efficiency when compute is cheap? ...