6 ms·

I don’t understand the obsession with small binaries and compiled packages. I care about usability and user experience. If it takes 5mb to have a smooth experie

I don’t understand the obsession with small binaries and compiled packages. I care about usability and user experience. If it takes 5mb to have a smooth experience then I’m all for it. It’s funny how we now have fiber having 1GB/s internet speeds and we rant about having 1MB size package being too big. Also, everyone’s moving to 4k now with even bigger transfer/data requirements. tldr; 1mb should be a non issue as long as experience improves.

saagarjha 7y ago
> It’s funny now that there’s fiber having 1GB/s internet speeds, we rant about 1MB size package. Half the people in the world probably struggle to have access to a 10 Mb/s connection. Even I go to places with connections that are tenuous at best.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Hixie 7y ago
  (I'm the Flutter TL.) Yeah, I was just writing a design doc earlier today and my math for how big a download we could reasonably expect users to wait for was based on a 5Mbit/s download speed. Half a megabyte takes under a second at that speed, but 5 megabytes takes more like 8 seconds. That's a huge difference. In an environment like the Web, where ephemerality is the norm, you really have to stay below 1MB from what I can tell.
  - AlphaSite 7y ago
    All of this takes memory. Also i do a lot more than use some crappy flutter calculator.
  - sandGorgon 7y ago
    India. Next billion users. Size matters a lot.
  - codedokode 7y ago
    Also please consider how many seconds will it take for a cheap Android phone to parse 5 Mb of JS (and how much memory it would take after parsing, which can be up to 10 times more that original code size). I think it can become much more than 8 seconds, and during parsing the browser will likely become unresponsive.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Should try all your Dev and browsing on a 2gb low end Chromebook, and last gen lower end phone for a couple months. Then see how you feel about it all.
    - joking 7y ago
      I develop apps for tvs, so size and performance matters a lot since they are a lot of tvs already shipped with low end SOCs. newer ones are more powerful, but people doesn't change tv as frequently as phones.
- westoque 7y ago
  I think there’s a middleground there that if you want to support these countries then there should be a framework for this (Flutter Lite?).. But if you want the complete feature set that is “bloated” but has good ux/ui support then that should be fine as well.
  - vturner 7y ago
    "these countries"? I've seen schools in the US with 15 mb/s My mothers, Xfinity, has a low tier, 25mb/s.
    - Swalden123 7y ago
      A lot of Australia is still stuck on ADSL with speeds of 5 - 20Mb if your lucky
  - Hixie 7y ago
    (I'm the Flutter TL) Our current plan is to support the complete feature set while still supporting places with connectivity around 5Mbit/s. We are still in very early stages (we only just put out the tech preview today!) but we have some confidence that this is possible. Personally I'm more worried about the performance of layout animations (e.g. resizing paragraphs) than about download size, but again, it's early days still.
- tracker1 7y ago
  It's not just the transfer... It's the compile, load and perceived speed. 1mb compressed and gzipped can be a hundred MB parsed and in memory. Which isn't bad on a modern mid level desktop, but it's crazy on a lower end smart phone. There are also other factors to consider. I'm not huge in premature optimization, but damn.
ryandvm 7y ago
I don't think it's the actual file sizes that people object to so much as all the redundancy and inefficiency that the bloat is indicative of. That is, for every increase in CPU, storage, and bandwidth; app developers insist on throwing it away with another layer of frameworks and intermediary libraries. What Moore's Law giveth, React/Flutter taketh away...
- tracker1 7y ago
  There are smaller/faster ready like libraries such as preact and inferno btw. React does offer a lot of advantages though mostly for diagnostic purposes for developers.
ChikkaChiChi 7y ago
Faster speeds for some do not equate to faster speeds for all. This applies doubly so when bandwidth is metered and may cost the end user more money. Abstraction for the engineer should not come at the expense of the person on the other end of the wire.
- westoque 7y ago
  I disagree. I think Ruby/Rails is a good example of this. They maximize on developer happiness but that doesn’t stop users from using a bloated rails app. Take a look at GitHub/GitLab as an example of a Rails app I guess?
  - pcr0 7y ago
    I don't see how end users suffer from using Rails. Server side rerponse time is a very small component of page load time for most websites. It's different from being forced to download and parse megabytes of JS, which consumes CPU, battery and time.
    - tspike 7y ago
      Not to mention your data plan
    - tracker1 7y ago
      There's more CPU time across 1000 users' browsers than on the server. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to minimize your load at both ends.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        The difference is who pays for the load. And now that developers make the visitors pay for the load (through their electricity bill, and also through their mental state), they don't give a shit about how much the users will have to pay - and thus how much electricity will be unnecessarily wasted on a global scale.
gbba 7y ago
Not everyone is so fortunate to have 1GB/s internet. Waiting for a page to load is a terrible user experience.
- geerlingguy 7y ago
  Outside of a select few cities, getting anything more than 100 mbps down is literally impossible unless you have the budget to pay a company to run fiber to your home (at least tens or hundreds of thousands). And outside of major cities, 10 mbps might be the best you can get. Not to mention there are a thousand situations even inside of the major cities where a few mbps (if that) is all you can muster. I for one hate pages that take minutes to load... and it happens a lot more than you’d hope.
  - zeitg3ist 7y ago
    ...in the US? Here in Europe I’m paying 30 euro/month for 200 megabit down (just 20 up, though), and I live in a 50k people town.
  - ubercow13 7y ago
    Even in London I think some places only get 10Mbps
    - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
      I'm getting 32 mbps from BT for £52.49. My O2 mobile internet hardly works at all. London really has terrible internet infrastructure. I wouldn't be surprised at all if some people got no more than 10 mbps as you say.
      - zimpenfish 7y ago
        > London really has terrible internet infrastructure. I think it probably has average infrastructure shared over too many connections. If I do 4G speed tests up north, it's always way faster but there's also way fewer people trying to use it concurrently...
s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
Test on a phone, anything over 1MB will lock up the script parser for a few seconds.
carmate383 7y ago
The irony is, the same people complaining about 500kb are probably the same people using a 100MB+ terminal emulator built using a web browser (i.e. hyper).
- tracker1 7y ago
  You don't download the entire app every time you change directories like you do navigating between sites in a browser.
  - carmate383 7y ago
    If you're sending JavaScript down the line with every request, you're doing it wrong and should give up your career.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      When you go to a new website, it doesn't download anything?
      - carmate383 7y ago
        NEW website. As in, ONCE and FIRST TIME.
dkersten 7y ago
I have gigabit internet and the web is still dog slow. It got a good bit faster when I started blocking third party garbage, but it still doesn't feel any faster than it was in the early 2000's, despite that my internet is literally 17,000 times faster and my computer is also tons faster.
- vonseel 7y ago
  This has also been my experience, uBlock origin improved performance on many websites (and also clues me into how many unnecessary connections by analytics and tracking servers are made by so many sites). It is mind boggling to see sometimes 250+ blocked requests on the badge for a news article.
  - dkersten 7y ago
    Yeah. I started very aggressively blocking all third party stuff and then I manually whitelist things as needed. Its crazy how many requests some sites make, for stuff that has no impact on the content I actually want.

saagarjha 7y ago

> It’s funny now that there’s fiber having 1GB/s internet speeds, we rant about 1MB size package. Half the people in the world probably struggle to have access to a 10 Mb/s connection. Even I go to places with connections that are tenuous at best.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Hixie 7y ago
(I'm the Flutter TL.) Yeah, I was just writing a design doc earlier today and my math for how big a download we could reasonably expect users to wait for was based on a 5Mbit/s download speed. Half a megabyte takes under a second at that speed, but 5 megabytes takes more like 8 seconds. That's a huge difference. In an environment like the Web, where ephemerality is the norm, you really have to stay below 1MB from what I can tell.
- AlphaSite 7y ago
  All of this takes memory. Also i do a lot more than use some crappy flutter calculator.
- sandGorgon 7y ago
  India. Next billion users. Size matters a lot.
- codedokode 7y ago
  Also please consider how many seconds will it take for a cheap Android phone to parse 5 Mb of JS (and how much memory it would take after parsing, which can be up to 10 times more that original code size). I think it can become much more than 8 seconds, and during parsing the browser will likely become unresponsive.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Should try all your Dev and browsing on a 2gb low end Chromebook, and last gen lower end phone for a couple months. Then see how you feel about it all.
  - joking 7y ago
    I develop apps for tvs, so size and performance matters a lot since they are a lot of tvs already shipped with low end SOCs. newer ones are more powerful, but people doesn't change tv as frequently as phones.
westoque 7y ago
I think there’s a middleground there that if you want to support these countries then there should be a framework for this (Flutter Lite?).. But if you want the complete feature set that is “bloated” but has good ux/ui support then that should be fine as well.
- vturner 7y ago
  "these countries"? I've seen schools in the US with 15 mb/s My mothers, Xfinity, has a low tier, 25mb/s.
  - Swalden123 7y ago
    A lot of Australia is still stuck on ADSL with speeds of 5 - 20Mb if your lucky
- Hixie 7y ago
  (I'm the Flutter TL) Our current plan is to support the complete feature set while still supporting places with connectivity around 5Mbit/s. We are still in very early stages (we only just put out the tech preview today!) but we have some confidence that this is possible. Personally I'm more worried about the performance of layout animations (e.g. resizing paragraphs) than about download size, but again, it's early days still.
tracker1 7y ago
It's not just the transfer... It's the compile, load and perceived speed. 1mb compressed and gzipped can be a hundred MB parsed and in memory. Which isn't bad on a modern mid level desktop, but it's crazy on a lower end smart phone. There are also other factors to consider. I'm not huge in premature optimization, but damn.

ryandvm 7y ago

I don't think it's the actual file sizes that people object to so much as all the redundancy and inefficiency that the bloat is indicative of. That is, for every increase in CPU, storage, and bandwidth; app developers insist on throwing it away with another layer of frameworks and intermediary libraries. What Moore's Law giveth, React/Flutter taketh away...

tracker1 7y ago
There are smaller/faster ready like libraries such as preact and inferno btw. React does offer a lot of advantages though mostly for diagnostic purposes for developers.

ChikkaChiChi 7y ago

Faster speeds for some do not equate to faster speeds for all. This applies doubly so when bandwidth is metered and may cost the end user more money. Abstraction for the engineer should not come at the expense of the person on the other end of the wire.

westoque 7y ago
I disagree. I think Ruby/Rails is a good example of this. They maximize on developer happiness but that doesn’t stop users from using a bloated rails app. Take a look at GitHub/GitLab as an example of a Rails app I guess?
- pcr0 7y ago
  I don't see how end users suffer from using Rails. Server side rerponse time is a very small component of page load time for most websites. It's different from being forced to download and parse megabytes of JS, which consumes CPU, battery and time.
  - tspike 7y ago
    Not to mention your data plan
  - tracker1 7y ago
    There's more CPU time across 1000 users' browsers than on the server. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to minimize your load at both ends.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      The difference is who pays for the load. And now that developers make the visitors pay for the load (through their electricity bill, and also through their mental state), they don't give a shit about how much the users will have to pay - and thus how much electricity will be unnecessarily wasted on a global scale.

gbba 7y ago

Not everyone is so fortunate to have 1GB/s internet. Waiting for a page to load is a terrible user experience.

geerlingguy 7y ago
Outside of a select few cities, getting anything more than 100 mbps down is literally impossible unless you have the budget to pay a company to run fiber to your home (at least tens or hundreds of thousands). And outside of major cities, 10 mbps might be the best you can get. Not to mention there are a thousand situations even inside of the major cities where a few mbps (if that) is all you can muster. I for one hate pages that take minutes to load... and it happens a lot more than you’d hope.
- zeitg3ist 7y ago
  ...in the US? Here in Europe I’m paying 30 euro/month for 200 megabit down (just 20 up, though), and I live in a 50k people town.
- ubercow13 7y ago
  Even in London I think some places only get 10Mbps
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    I'm getting 32 mbps from BT for £52.49. My O2 mobile internet hardly works at all. London really has terrible internet infrastructure. I wouldn't be surprised at all if some people got no more than 10 mbps as you say.
    - zimpenfish 7y ago
      > London really has terrible internet infrastructure. I think it probably has average infrastructure shared over too many connections. If I do 4G speed tests up north, it's always way faster but there's also way fewer people trying to use it concurrently...

s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago

Test on a phone, anything over 1MB will lock up the script parser for a few seconds.

carmate383 7y ago

The irony is, the same people complaining about 500kb are probably the same people using a 100MB+ terminal emulator built using a web browser (i.e. hyper).

tracker1 7y ago
You don't download the entire app every time you change directories like you do navigating between sites in a browser.
- carmate383 7y ago
  If you're sending JavaScript down the line with every request, you're doing it wrong and should give up your career.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    When you go to a new website, it doesn't download anything?
    - carmate383 7y ago
      NEW website. As in, ONCE and FIRST TIME.

dkersten 7y ago

I have gigabit internet and the web is still dog slow. It got a good bit faster when I started blocking third party garbage, but it still doesn't feel any faster than it was in the early 2000's, despite that my internet is literally 17,000 times faster and my computer is also tons faster.

vonseel 7y ago
This has also been my experience, uBlock origin improved performance on many websites (and also clues me into how many unnecessary connections by analytics and tracking servers are made by so many sites). It is mind boggling to see sometimes 250+ blocked requests on the badge for a news article.
- dkersten 7y ago
  Yeah. I started very aggressively blocking all third party stuff and then I manually whitelist things as needed. Its crazy how many requests some sites make, for stuff that has no impact on the content I actually want.