Wirth’s law
Wirth’s law is an adage on computer performance that states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
It was formulated by Niklaus Wirth, the Swiss computer scientist best known for designing Pascal, in a 1995 article titled A Plea for Lean Software.
The law is a counterpoint to Moore’s law. While transistor counts double roughly every two years, software tends to expand to consume those gains through bloat, abstraction layers, and the prioritization of developer experience over runtime efficiency.
Wirth’s law is closely related to Zawinski’s law, which observes that programs expand until they can read email, and which has been interpreted as a comment on the phenomenon of software bloat.