@bumpus @june @blacklight there's alot more to it than that, and purpose built hardware doesn't affect this very much (purpose built software however is a major factor).

But also, there's years of cruft from programmers no longer being under pressure for resources. Very often today the memory usage of a program relates to the fact that it would take a lot of work to optimize it, and systems have more than enough resources to run it unoptimized without much issue...