alt Hacker NewsUsually thats not the case. Its mostly abstraction layers upon abstraction layers upon abstraction layers that causes this issue
Sometime in the late 90s there started a fundamental change in the software development process. We changed from optimising software for the end user (development is difficult) to optimising the software development process for the developer at the expense of user resources
That's true for Electron apps. For other kinds of desktop app, it's mostly stuff like artwork, double buffers and fonts. Go profile a desktop app heap and see for yourself.
One of the main selling points of Turbo Pascal was OWL: the Object Windows Library, which was just a big OOP abstraction over Win16. Here's some sample code:
https://github.com/TeamVault/pascal-programs/blob/master/Pas...
Doesn't look radically different to how a GUI app that targets a native framework would look today. OWL added bloat to make developer lives easier. It was ever thus.