The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

I like to point out that since ~1980, computing power has increased about 1000X.

If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that), and we turned it on everywhere, we could have computers that are just a mere 950X faster.

If you went back in time to 1980 and offered the following choice:

I'll give you a computer that runs 950X faster and doesn't have a huge class of memory safety vulnerabilities, and you can debug your programs orders of magnitude more easily, or you can have a computer that runs 1000X faster and software will be just as buggy, or worse, and debugging will be even more of a nightmare.

People would have their minds blown at 950X. You wouldn't even have to offer 1000X. But guess what we chose...

Personally I think the 1000Xers kinda ruined things for the rest of us.

Don't forget the law of large numters. 5% performance hit on one system is one thing, 5% across almost all of the current computing landscape is still a pretty huge value.

It's about 5%.

Cost of cyberattacks globally[1]: O($trillions)

Cost of average data breach[2][3]: ~$4 million

Cost of lost developer productivity: unknown

We're really bad at measuring the secondary effects of our short-sightedness.

[1] https://iotsecurityfoundation.org/time-to-fix-our-digital-fo...

[2] https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2023/how-to-ta...

[3] https://www.ibm.com/reports/data-breach