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The cynical answer is: binary size is, like the price of gasoline, highly legible all out of proportion to its importance, and for that reason, influential. It'
by gwern 7y ago
The cynical answer is: binary size is, like the price of gasoline, highly legible all out of proportion to its importance, and for that reason, influential. It's easy to see instantly how big a package is because everything reports it as an easy standard metric. You can see binary sizes go up as you add functionality or dependencies. But it's not easy to see actual end-user performance, bug-freeness, or security (binary size being only weakly correlated, at best, to things like those, which the user actually cares about). Setting up a meaningful benchmark or testsuite is much harder than noticing that your binary is no longer <5mb. So, the latter happens more than the former.
- nikisweeting 7y agoYou can still claim that you have a small core binary of 200kb, while offering the 20 modules in the default package manager distribution that bring it up to 8mb. Then refer people to "apt install packagename-minimal" if they only want the core.
- gwern 7y agoYou can but that requires more of an attitude of gaming metrics than most people will have. Lots of metrics are easy to game if you explicitly set out to, but most people aren't dishonest; it's the ones which are easily gameable without explicitly trying to which are the dangerous ones, because most people are honest.