Well you can do a lot with 640k…if you try. We have 16G in base machines and very few people know how to try anymore.

The world has moved on, that code-golf time is now spent on ad algorithms or whatever.

Escaping the constraint delivered a different future than anticipated.

> you can do a lot with 640k…if you try.

it is economically not viable to try anymore.

"XYZ Corp" won't allow their developers to write their desktop app in Rust because they want to consume only 16MB RAM, then another implementation for mobile with Swift and/or Kotlin, when they can release good enough solution with React + Electron consuming 4GB RAM and reuse components with React Native.

People get hung up on bad optimization. It you are the working at sufficiently large scale, yes, thinking about bytes might be a good use of your time.

But most likely, it's not. At a system level we don't want people to do that. It's a waste of resources. Making a virtue out of it is bad, unless you care more about bytes than humans.

The simple fact is that a 16 GB RAM stick costs much less than the development time to make the app run on less.

Especially if the 640k are "in your hand" and the rest is "in the cloud"