Re:Software is eating the car
by giantrobot on Thursday June 10, 2021 @01:14PM
(#27463057)
I'm definitely in the same boat wrt complexity. My pickup has just enough extra electronics to be a quality of life improvement over a model that lacked those features. It doesn't try to drive for me and second guess my actions in unexpected ways. It doesn't give me unfathomable warning beeps that only serve as a distraction trying to figure out what's causing the beep.
At the same time it's important to recognize there's a difference between software bloat and growth. Security fixes often cause code to grow (checks, verifications, etc). That growth isn't bloat. The previous version of the software was exploitable because it lacked the checks that were added. Adding drivers or better handling edge cases in drivers grows code but isn't bloat.
Even "bloat" that's only added on-disk size (a secret Tetris game in some code) that doesn't affect normal code flow isn't the same as bloat as adding some advertising telemetry in the middle of a critical code path.
Not all code growth is bloat and not all bloat is equal.
At the same time it's important to recognize there's a difference between software bloat and growth. Security fixes often cause code to grow (checks, verifications, etc). That growth isn't bloat. The previous version of the software was exploitable because it lacked the checks that were added. Adding drivers or better handling edge cases in drivers grows code but isn't bloat.
Even "bloat" that's only added on-disk size (a secret Tetris game in some code) that doesn't affect normal code flow isn't the same as bloat as adding some advertising telemetry in the middle of a critical code path.
Not all code growth is bloat and not all bloat is equal.