Posted by andsoitis 4 hours ago
Of course, lots of things that make modern software bigger are things we very much don't want to do without--full Unicode support, accessibility, clever rendering, improvements to quality of life. But our 'foundations' are also built higher; the Web platform and a bunch of native toolkits provide a lot out of the box. (The platform doesn't include all the widgets that are now quasi-standard, of course, so we build a lot on top anyway.)
There are also a ton of useful third-party libraries you can call on without getting too bloated, and there's a lot that would have been bloated then but not now: in the 90s you probably wouldn't embed an SQL DB you didn't really need, but SQLite is a pretty safe dependency now.
Nothing in particular I'm really driving towards here but I think "how do I keep the code to functionality ratio good" can still be an interesting angle from which to look at high-level design decisions even as a lot of the circumstances and numbers have changed over decades.
https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos
(which I'd love to see get ported to the Raspberry Pi EDIT: or updated to make it easy to run on contemporary hardware)
I think it would be remarkably feasible. The size and memory model is almost ideally suited.
A rp2350 with PSRAM and a SD card as a harddrive could do a quite capabLe implementation.
It's more of an architecture port than a code port because it is almost all ASM.
Some previous and related discussion:
2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748209
GeoWorks: The Other Windows (2019)