5 ms·

Tired of all the bloat in JS, with the distributed app weighting a whopping 2 MB, I said to myself &#@£ this, I'm going to make a native app. What I ended up wi

by z3t4 7y ago

Tired of all the bloat in JS, with the distributed app weighting a whopping 2 MB, I said to myself &#@£ this, I'm going to make a native app. What I ended up with was a 300MB statically linked binary - to show "hello world".

ivanfon 7y ago
What stack did you use?
- dijit 7y ago
  300MB; so probably golang with a whole lot of go packages. But for real. Terraform is like 300mb for the binary, easily the largest single binary on my system. (And it’s golang)
- z3t4 7y ago
  Dlang with bindings to a C GUI lib for Linux.
saagarjha 7y ago
> statically linked Why?
- z3t4 7y ago
  I wanted to optimize startup time. And I was thinking it would be easier to distribute with just one "big" executable.
gdxhyrd 7y ago
I guess you are trolling, because a native app can print "hello world" in around 100 bytes. That's a difference of more than 6 orders of magnitude :')
- z3t4 7y ago
  It is true that a web app needs a browser. But a native app needs an operating system (OS). Something that I find fascinating though are apps that you can boot into, eg. they do not require an OS. But if you want graphics, mouse support, play sound etc, it becomes quite complicated. Compare that to a web app where you get all that functionality for free, with no libraries needed. And in between we have the shared lib utopia with Debian et.al and dll-hell with Windows. Each stack have their advantages and disadvantages. I however don't see bundle sizes on the web as a huge problem, at least not yet. With service workers you can download the app once, then even use it offline. Everything is just one click away and can be reached via an URL. And if you stick with "vanilla" it can also be fast and lightweight.
  - gdxhyrd 7y ago
    Wait, what? So you think a kernel is large and has to be counted in the total, even if a browser also requires a kernel. Yet you think web apps don't need libraries, so you are not even counting the browser and its dozens of libraries?

by z3t4 7y ago

ivanfon 7y ago

What stack did you use?

dijit 7y ago
300MB; so probably golang with a whole lot of go packages. But for real. Terraform is like 300mb for the binary, easily the largest single binary on my system. (And it’s golang)
z3t4 7y ago
Dlang with bindings to a C GUI lib for Linux.

saagarjha 7y ago

> statically linked Why?

z3t4 7y ago
I wanted to optimize startup time. And I was thinking it would be easier to distribute with just one "big" executable.

gdxhyrd 7y ago

I guess you are trolling, because a native app can print "hello world" in around 100 bytes. That's a difference of more than 6 orders of magnitude :')

z3t4 7y ago
It is true that a web app needs a browser. But a native app needs an operating system (OS). Something that I find fascinating though are apps that you can boot into, eg. they do not require an OS. But if you want graphics, mouse support, play sound etc, it becomes quite complicated. Compare that to a web app where you get all that functionality for free, with no libraries needed. And in between we have the shared lib utopia with Debian et.al and dll-hell with Windows. Each stack have their advantages and disadvantages. I however don't see bundle sizes on the web as a huge problem, at least not yet. With service workers you can download the app once, then even use it offline. Everything is just one click away and can be reached via an URL. And if you stick with "vanilla" it can also be fast and lightweight.
- gdxhyrd 7y ago
  Wait, what? So you think a kernel is large and has to be counted in the total, even if a browser also requires a kernel. Yet you think web apps don't need libraries, so you are not even counting the browser and its dozens of libraries?