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>the release binary is now 5.9M A typical smartphone ships with around 10,000 times this much storage capacity and enough RAM to hold it 100 times over. This

>the release binary is now 5.9M A typical smartphone ships with around 10,000 times this much storage capacity and enough RAM to hold it 100 times over. This is bloat? I mean, I get it, the binary used to be only 2MB, 1/3rd the size. But are numbers this low really worth worrying about? I think a GUI app in 6MB is hugely impressive. I genuinely thought he was going to say it was 100MB or something higher.

dmix 7y ago
Even Raspberry Pis have many GBs of both disk and RAM and super fast USB, MicroSD, and network transfer speeds. I don't really see the difference between 5mb and 20mb bins. And I'm a fan of minimalist OS systems like Archlinux with a slim set of running services. Disk space isn't really the main concern besides as a symbolic measure of cruft. No system is ever going to fill up space by having too many OS/terminal programs installed. But I also don't come from the nostalgic Unixy C programming world. Just a Unix user. So I may be biased.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  >> Even Raspberry Pis have many GBs of both disk and RAM and super fast USB, MicroSD, and network transfer speeds. You are speaking about _latest_ Pis.
  - dmix 7y ago
    No I'm not. Pi 2 meets all of those requirements and has MicroSDHC which offer tons of high speed space even at entry level. Besides that was an example, I have plenty of other IoT and embedded style hardware and they are all fitting this criteria. Simply put the size of binaries has never been a real concern for some time now and the few rare cases where it might matter probably aren't worth all the effort made obsessing over sub 50mb bin size. 99%+ of it will be people who "feel" like it should be small, without any good reason.
xyzzyz 7y ago
I think a GUI app in 6MB is hugely impressive. You think that because nobody cares about bloat anymore, so everything else is large.
- Scuds 7y ago
  If you want to code a large app in C with X Athena Widgets or Win32 you're welcome to do so.
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    Fltk can give you a static binary on every platform where simple GUIs are under 100KB. Win32 isn't actually all that bad and getting simple GUI programs with icons under 10KB is completely doable. Thinking that GUIs need to be 6 MB or painful is a complete false dichotomy.
    - orf 7y ago
      Arguing about 10KB or 100KB applications on a comment page that's 40kb in size is somewhat silly. It's _worth_ it to trade 1mb, 10mb or 100mb of app size in some cases. That's why you don't hand-craft your "simple 100kb guis" in assembly and have them only be 1kb. Exactly the same principle applies here. Plus, realistically, users don't care. Not one bit. That's why Slack is out here capturing the market, while some other lightweight and exquisitely coded 10kb tool written in C isn't. Because they are shipping features the users want and iterating fast on their memory hungry and bloated platform, while the other one segfaults when there is an unencountered error.
      - BubRoss 7y ago
        The reason that it isn't silly is that people keep saying these larger sizes are necessary when anyone with some perspective and history in computers knows that it's ridiculous. You can say users don't care about bloat and speed, but when they have an alternative that is clearly not the case. uTorrent destroyed the market share of other torrent clients by being lightning fast and tiny. Chrome captured market share off of being fast. IE originally killed Netscape because it 'loaded' much faster. Winamp won because it was fast and tiny. Google won because it loaded fast and the searches were fast. Google maps won because it was full screen and still faster than MapQuest. People hate the Reddit redesign because it is slow and bloated. People like hacker news' interface because it is fast. People upgrade their phones to see dramatic speed differences. A major advantage of apple is their faster CPUs. When users have no choice, they put up with whatever bloated nonsense they have to. When they have a choice, they do actually go with interactivity and less latency. You can be patronizing and pretend that it's archaic to care about well made software that doesn't take up 100x the resources it should need, but when someone wants software that gets out of their way, scales well, or runs on a low power platform, that 300 MB chat client isn't going to cut it.
jgibson 7y ago
It's not just ram that we care about, its all the other CPU caches that are significantly smaller that a larger binary will take up more space in
userbinator 7y ago
I think a GUI app in 6MB is hugely impressive. Windows 3.11 required 4MB of RAM and the whole install took <20MB of disk space, and that's the entire OS with all of its utilities and libraries. A typical smartphone ships with around 10,000 times this much storage capacity and enough RAM to hold it 100 times over. The fact that it can hold that much does not make it right to waste resources. To contrast, video or audio is a good use of the space it takes up in general, because there has been and continues to be research in compressing that data, and it's pretty close to being as small as it can practically be. Apps are not a good use of space because we know roughly what the lower limit is --- and the current average is a few orders of magnitude more than that.
- orf 7y ago
  > Windows 3.11 required 4MB of RAM and the whole install took <20MB of disk space, and that's the entire OS with all of its utilities and libraries. Sure, and the moon landing used computers with less processing power than your kids calculator. That doesn't mean we should use those to put people on the moon over faster hardware. Does the fact that older, slower and smaller hardware and software once existed mean we should spend time, resources and potentially sacrifice features to... what? Hark back to the old days where we had 128kb of memory and hard disks the size of vinyl records? A 6mb GUI app _is_ impressive for right now. At some point in time it would have been absolutely massive, and the way it's going, at some point in the future it may well be absolutely minuscule. And that's not a bad thing.
  - mwcampbell 7y ago
    But what if GUI applications that were considered lean and mean in the 90s were common on today's hardware? Wouldn't those applications be really fast and light on resources?
    - littlestymaar 7y ago
      Fast and light on resources isn't the same thing: a GPU-accelerated GUI toolkit is going to be bigger than a full software one, but also much faster on modern hardware.
nwah1 7y ago
If you want to compile to wasm and send it over the wire, 6mb would seem like a lot.
mrmonkeyman 7y ago
It is the mindset. Slacking off leads to increasingly suboptimal apps. As long as the sales dept picks up the slack, it will work out, but it will bite you one of these days. India, China, Africa. Huge, huge markets. Slow, old, crap hardware and networks. Do the math.
pjmlp 7y ago
Yes it is bloat. Just go at any iOS or Android conference discussing user monetization. APK/IPA sizes are the number one reason why consumers uninstall software and the reason behind the ongoing module format efforts from Apple and Google. I have written GUI apps that could fit in a floppy.
- floatboth 7y ago
  No way. Most people don't know the sizes of their apks. > discussing user monetization Monetization must be a much bigger reason. A lot more users would angrily uninstall an app that showed them a giant full screen ad.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    There are plenty of WWDC, IO and Android Summit talks about this subject, just in case you want to improve your knowledge.
Keyframe 7y ago
QNX fit OS, utilities and a web browser on a 1,44MB floppy disk.
xenocratus 7y ago
Rust is used a lot for embedded development, and the memory available on an IoT device is nowhere near that of a smartphone. You probably won't want a GUI running on an IoT sensor, but you might need a network stack, maybe some data processing...

dmix 7y ago

Even Raspberry Pis have many GBs of both disk and RAM and super fast USB, MicroSD, and network transfer speeds. I don't really see the difference between 5mb and 20mb bins. And I'm a fan of minimalist OS systems like Archlinux with a slim set of running services. Disk space isn't really the main concern besides as a symbolic measure of cruft. No system is ever going to fill up space by having too many OS/terminal programs installed. But I also don't come from the nostalgic Unixy C programming world. Just a Unix user. So I may be biased.

heavenlyblue 7y ago
>> Even Raspberry Pis have many GBs of both disk and RAM and super fast USB, MicroSD, and network transfer speeds. You are speaking about _latest_ Pis.
- dmix 7y ago
  No I'm not. Pi 2 meets all of those requirements and has MicroSDHC which offer tons of high speed space even at entry level. Besides that was an example, I have plenty of other IoT and embedded style hardware and they are all fitting this criteria. Simply put the size of binaries has never been a real concern for some time now and the few rare cases where it might matter probably aren't worth all the effort made obsessing over sub 50mb bin size. 99%+ of it will be people who "feel" like it should be small, without any good reason.

xyzzyz 7y ago

I think a GUI app in 6MB is hugely impressive. You think that because nobody cares about bloat anymore, so everything else is large.

Scuds 7y ago
If you want to code a large app in C with X Athena Widgets or Win32 you're welcome to do so.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  Fltk can give you a static binary on every platform where simple GUIs are under 100KB. Win32 isn't actually all that bad and getting simple GUI programs with icons under 10KB is completely doable. Thinking that GUIs need to be 6 MB or painful is a complete false dichotomy.
  - orf 7y ago
    Arguing about 10KB or 100KB applications on a comment page that's 40kb in size is somewhat silly. It's _worth_ it to trade 1mb, 10mb or 100mb of app size in some cases. That's why you don't hand-craft your "simple 100kb guis" in assembly and have them only be 1kb. Exactly the same principle applies here. Plus, realistically, users don't care. Not one bit. That's why Slack is out here capturing the market, while some other lightweight and exquisitely coded 10kb tool written in C isn't. Because they are shipping features the users want and iterating fast on their memory hungry and bloated platform, while the other one segfaults when there is an unencountered error.
    - BubRoss 7y ago
      The reason that it isn't silly is that people keep saying these larger sizes are necessary when anyone with some perspective and history in computers knows that it's ridiculous. You can say users don't care about bloat and speed, but when they have an alternative that is clearly not the case. uTorrent destroyed the market share of other torrent clients by being lightning fast and tiny. Chrome captured market share off of being fast. IE originally killed Netscape because it 'loaded' much faster. Winamp won because it was fast and tiny. Google won because it loaded fast and the searches were fast. Google maps won because it was full screen and still faster than MapQuest. People hate the Reddit redesign because it is slow and bloated. People like hacker news' interface because it is fast. People upgrade their phones to see dramatic speed differences. A major advantage of apple is their faster CPUs. When users have no choice, they put up with whatever bloated nonsense they have to. When they have a choice, they do actually go with interactivity and less latency. You can be patronizing and pretend that it's archaic to care about well made software that doesn't take up 100x the resources it should need, but when someone wants software that gets out of their way, scales well, or runs on a low power platform, that 300 MB chat client isn't going to cut it.

jgibson 7y ago

It's not just ram that we care about, its all the other CPU caches that are significantly smaller that a larger binary will take up more space in

userbinator 7y ago

I think a GUI app in 6MB is hugely impressive. Windows 3.11 required 4MB of RAM and the whole install took <20MB of disk space, and that's the entire OS with all of its utilities and libraries. A typical smartphone ships with around 10,000 times this much storage capacity and enough RAM to hold it 100 times over. The fact that it can hold that much does not make it right to waste resources. To contrast, video or audio is a good use of the space it takes up in general, because there has been and continues to be research in compressing that data, and it's pretty close to being as small as it can practically be. Apps are not a good use of space because we know roughly what the lower limit is --- and the current average is a few orders of magnitude more than that.

orf 7y ago
> Windows 3.11 required 4MB of RAM and the whole install took <20MB of disk space, and that's the entire OS with all of its utilities and libraries. Sure, and the moon landing used computers with less processing power than your kids calculator. That doesn't mean we should use those to put people on the moon over faster hardware. Does the fact that older, slower and smaller hardware and software once existed mean we should spend time, resources and potentially sacrifice features to... what? Hark back to the old days where we had 128kb of memory and hard disks the size of vinyl records? A 6mb GUI app _is_ impressive for right now. At some point in time it would have been absolutely massive, and the way it's going, at some point in the future it may well be absolutely minuscule. And that's not a bad thing.
- mwcampbell 7y ago
  But what if GUI applications that were considered lean and mean in the 90s were common on today's hardware? Wouldn't those applications be really fast and light on resources?
  - littlestymaar 7y ago
    Fast and light on resources isn't the same thing: a GPU-accelerated GUI toolkit is going to be bigger than a full software one, but also much faster on modern hardware.

nwah1 7y ago

If you want to compile to wasm and send it over the wire, 6mb would seem like a lot.

mrmonkeyman 7y ago

It is the mindset. Slacking off leads to increasingly suboptimal apps. As long as the sales dept picks up the slack, it will work out, but it will bite you one of these days. India, China, Africa. Huge, huge markets. Slow, old, crap hardware and networks. Do the math.

pjmlp 7y ago

Yes it is bloat. Just go at any iOS or Android conference discussing user monetization. APK/IPA sizes are the number one reason why consumers uninstall software and the reason behind the ongoing module format efforts from Apple and Google. I have written GUI apps that could fit in a floppy.

floatboth 7y ago
No way. Most people don't know the sizes of their apks. > discussing user monetization Monetization must be a much bigger reason. A lot more users would angrily uninstall an app that showed them a giant full screen ad.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  There are plenty of WWDC, IO and Android Summit talks about this subject, just in case you want to improve your knowledge.

Keyframe 7y ago

QNX fit OS, utilities and a web browser on a 1,44MB floppy disk.

xenocratus 7y ago

Rust is used a lot for embedded development, and the memory available on an IoT device is nowhere near that of a smartphone. You probably won't want a GUI running on an IoT sensor, but you might need a network stack, maybe some data processing...