4 ms·

> 74Kb payload Is 74Kb really a cause for concern on modern internet connections? I realize death by 1,000 cuts, etc...but for such a core set of functionality

> 74Kb payload Is 74Kb really a cause for concern on modern internet connections? I realize death by 1,000 cuts, etc...but for such a core set of functionality that seems pretty reasonable. DayJs is 2 (two) Kb. Perfectly reasonable for any app with minimal date handling needs. (BTW I'm 100% in support of a native temporal API also, although have some gripes with the Dev Exp of what's shown in this post)

nobleach 5y ago
My take: ABSOLUTELY! 74kb or image data? Probably not. But unzipping, parsing/JITting/running/whatever that large of a payload.... on crappy 3 year old low-memory Android devices... yes. That is going to lag. Not too long ago, Google tried to push AMP on all of us because devs were getting way too careless with their bundle sizes. We're still not to a decent place just yet. Internet speeds in The United States, Europe and populated Asia may be growing but there's an entire world that are still at "slow-3G" speeds.
enumjorge 5y ago
There are a lot of places in the world and even the US where people have slow connections. It’s also not just download speed that’s the problem. Slower phones need to process all that JS. I’d say that time-related API being core functionality makes it more of a reason why this should be baked into the standard JS API. Why make users download something that most sites and web apps use?
mkotowski 5y ago
From my personal experience in Poland: You can have LTE+ or even 5G in cities, but traveling by train means that in some areas only a select few extra-lightweight pages like Hacker News are able to load before a timeout or connection loss occurs. So yes, in some situations even that amount of payload could have a meaningful impact. “Modern” connections are irrelevant if we are talking about regions, which are not viable for a high-speed infrastructure. And such places are almost everywhere. Mountainous parts of Japan, many American regions, or sparsely populated Polish regions. Of course, how much it is important varies greatly.
onion2k 5y ago
Is 74Kb really a cause for concern on modern internet connections? That depends on how you define what a modern Internet connection is. If you mean a fast, low latency, unmetered connection then 74kb is obviously fine. If you mean a 4G connection on a train, or a metered rural satellite connection, or a typically-low-income-user pay-for-data connection, or even a fast cheap Internet connection but with a low-end device that will waste a lot of battery power parsing and running all that JS code, then it's a lot less obvious. Most of the time you don't know who the user is, so it's best to assume the worst case. If your site works well when things aren't ideal then it'll be awesome when they are good too. Only thinking about the happy path of users with M1 Macbooks with unlimited gigabit ethernet will mean everyone else has a sucky time on your site. Also, if someone posts your site on HN, most of the comments will be about how bad the code is and you'll miss out on feedback that's actually useful. If you're deploying a 74kb date library, think of your karma.
moksly 5y ago
I view it as more of a conceptual thing than a size issue. The 74kb is a symptom of the issue, which is that bad things can’t be deprecated because of backward compatibility. If there is solution that removes the necessity of a 74kb package then I think we should embrace it. I’m still fairly new to TypeScript but it’s quickly replacing Python as my daily driver for most things that aren’t back-end APIs.
moksly 5y ago
I view it as more of a conceptual thing than a size issue. The 74kb is a symptom of the issue, which is that bad things can’t be deprecated because of backward compatibility. If there is solution that removes the necessity of a 74kb package then I think we should embrace it. I’m still fairly new to TypeScript but it’s quickly replacing Python as my daily driver for most things that aren’t back-end APIs, and Date is certainly one of those things I would love to see changed.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
Even in locales with high speed internet, I find myself sharing a wifi router with a dozen or more devices in classrooms or coffee shops. It is a bit disheartening seeing google docs and slack struggle to stay responsive, and in a college town with fiber internet. I’ve also tried collaborating on satellite internet on a farm and at the end of a microwave-tower-daisy-chain, where youtube works great if you’re the only one in town using the connection. I think people assume Starlink will bring high-speed internet to every corner of the globe, but that being the case, there’s more situations where groups of people will share a single downlink, and still every kilobyte counts.
thrower123 5y ago
I weep when I think of how many millions of times libraries like jQuery, lodash, moment and so many others have been downloaded and re-downloaded and re-downloaded again over the decades. A considerable fraction of all the data ever sent on the internet is JS libraries that could have been bundled into browsers instead of every web page using slightly different versions.
jacobr 5y ago
It’s also 74 additional kb to parse and evaluate on the main thread before it can continue doing more interesting things like rendering the main content you came to the page for. On many devices (a huge number of users globally are on dirt cheap underpowered phones) this adds up to significant user experience problems.
tofflos 5y ago
I see it more as issues with fragmentation, wasted effort, and security. An anemic standard library forces every developer to either evaluate, or author, an alternative. This leads to an explosion of alternatives, which in turn makes it harder to agree on best practices and harder to secure the software supply chain.

nobleach 5y ago

My take: ABSOLUTELY! 74kb or image data? Probably not. But unzipping, parsing/JITting/running/whatever that large of a payload.... on crappy 3 year old low-memory Android devices... yes. That is going to lag. Not too long ago, Google tried to push AMP on all of us because devs were getting way too careless with their bundle sizes. We're still not to a decent place just yet. Internet speeds in The United States, Europe and populated Asia may be growing but there's an entire world that are still at "slow-3G" speeds.

enumjorge 5y ago

There are a lot of places in the world and even the US where people have slow connections. It’s also not just download speed that’s the problem. Slower phones need to process all that JS. I’d say that time-related API being core functionality makes it more of a reason why this should be baked into the standard JS API. Why make users download something that most sites and web apps use?

mkotowski 5y ago

From my personal experience in Poland: You can have LTE+ or even 5G in cities, but traveling by train means that in some areas only a select few extra-lightweight pages like Hacker News are able to load before a timeout or connection loss occurs. So yes, in some situations even that amount of payload could have a meaningful impact. “Modern” connections are irrelevant if we are talking about regions, which are not viable for a high-speed infrastructure. And such places are almost everywhere. Mountainous parts of Japan, many American regions, or sparsely populated Polish regions. Of course, how much it is important varies greatly.

onion2k 5y ago

Is 74Kb really a cause for concern on modern internet connections? That depends on how you define what a modern Internet connection is. If you mean a fast, low latency, unmetered connection then 74kb is obviously fine. If you mean a 4G connection on a train, or a metered rural satellite connection, or a typically-low-income-user pay-for-data connection, or even a fast cheap Internet connection but with a low-end device that will waste a lot of battery power parsing and running all that JS code, then it's a lot less obvious. Most of the time you don't know who the user is, so it's best to assume the worst case. If your site works well when things aren't ideal then it'll be awesome when they are good too. Only thinking about the happy path of users with M1 Macbooks with unlimited gigabit ethernet will mean everyone else has a sucky time on your site. Also, if someone posts your site on HN, most of the comments will be about how bad the code is and you'll miss out on feedback that's actually useful. If you're deploying a 74kb date library, think of your karma.

moksly 5y ago

I view it as more of a conceptual thing than a size issue. The 74kb is a symptom of the issue, which is that bad things can’t be deprecated because of backward compatibility. If there is solution that removes the necessity of a 74kb package then I think we should embrace it. I’m still fairly new to TypeScript but it’s quickly replacing Python as my daily driver for most things that aren’t back-end APIs.

moksly 5y ago

jazzyjackson 5y ago

Even in locales with high speed internet, I find myself sharing a wifi router with a dozen or more devices in classrooms or coffee shops. It is a bit disheartening seeing google docs and slack struggle to stay responsive, and in a college town with fiber internet. I’ve also tried collaborating on satellite internet on a farm and at the end of a microwave-tower-daisy-chain, where youtube works great if you’re the only one in town using the connection. I think people assume Starlink will bring high-speed internet to every corner of the globe, but that being the case, there’s more situations where groups of people will share a single downlink, and still every kilobyte counts.

thrower123 5y ago

I weep when I think of how many millions of times libraries like jQuery, lodash, moment and so many others have been downloaded and re-downloaded and re-downloaded again over the decades. A considerable fraction of all the data ever sent on the internet is JS libraries that could have been bundled into browsers instead of every web page using slightly different versions.

jacobr 5y ago

It’s also 74 additional kb to parse and evaluate on the main thread before it can continue doing more interesting things like rendering the main content you came to the page for. On many devices (a huge number of users globally are on dirt cheap underpowered phones) this adds up to significant user experience problems.

tofflos 5y ago

I see it more as issues with fragmentation, wasted effort, and security. An anemic standard library forces every developer to either evaluate, or author, an alternative. This leads to an explosion of alternatives, which in turn makes it harder to agree on best practices and harder to secure the software supply chain.