Why Modern Software is Slow?

because we have this:
http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/game-programming/case-study-bomberman-mechanics-in-an-entity-component-system-r3159

The article is a great introduction into ECS but it's also arguably an introduction into over engineering.

Bomberman is a product of an 8bit/16bit era and ran on systems that had very little ram and weren't programmed in higher level languages. As such there were no "powerup components". Powerups were just tiles placed in the map. Making them components and or having them as active game objects would have taken too much ram and too much processing.

Modern software is slow because of high levels of abstraction. Reducing the levels of abstraction is only going to multiply the cost of software development. This is the reason why we use standard libraries as opposed to reimplementing the wheel for each project.