I know that some people are only as efficient as they're forced to be. I hope there are efforts to take what is needed, and make it more efficient. There are efforts like Commander X16 to make a new 8 bit computer, and others where people are rewriting things in Rust..

BTW, I have a first gen iPad sitting around that worked very the first two years or so of its existence, and it barely functions today. I know part of that is Apple "protecting" older batteries by slowing down older stuff so we go out and buy new things, but I would like to believe that we're capable or creating an OS for that hardware today that would run better than it did originally, rather than barely function at all.

> Can't find but feel there's a quote like "Programs will grow to fill memory"

That is a ball we set in motion when we introduced virtual memory, particularly with overcommit.

Give a developer the option to write calls to malloc that never fail, and boy will they make use of that! Performance be damned.

Not necessarily on the desktop today, but yes. There are workloads like this out there.