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"Gratuitous software" would be excessive and unnecessary software. Which I think a lot of commercial (particularly "news") websites qualify for, and "modern" we

"Gratuitous software" would be excessive and unnecessary software. Which I think a lot of commercial (particularly "news") websites qualify for, and "modern" websites in general. NPM makes it easy to just install something, which requires all kinds of other things, which duplicate each other, etc. Strangely enough, I think the LaTex distribution qualifies, too. I tried to install it recently, and it wanted 1 GB of disk space! That's multiple times the size of the entire system disk when LaTeX was created... Sooner or later a lot of the web is going to run on WASM, at which point we'll have a virtual machine running in a user program running on an OS which incompletely virtualizes the bare machine (hence why we've ended up with WASM). Extra gratuitousity if the browser is an Intel binary being run on an M* processor via Rosetta translation... Maybe eventually we'll realize that the OS needs to provide a full virtual machine, complete with window to draw in, filesystem isolation like Plan 9, etc. But, inertia will probably make it take while.

uncanneyvalley 2y ago
Matryoshka virtualization
bmacho 2y ago
> Strangely enough, I think the LaTex distribution qualifies, too. I tried to install it recently, and it wanted 1 GB of disk space! That's multiple times the size of the entire system disk when LaTeX was created... There is the TinyTeX distribution, which is smaller. (Despite its name, it isn't tiny, or small, or medium in size, but it is also large. But smaller than the default LaTeX distribution with all the possible packages, source code and documents.)
- mickmcq 2y ago
  My impression is that TinyTeX downloads required packages on the fly and can be quite tiny if you don’t use many packages.
  - bmacho 2y ago
    Well here in the project readme there is a table with the sizes: https://github.com/rstudio/tinytex-releases https://github.com/rstudio/tinytex-releases (a bit outdated, they didn't refresh it). I downloaded TinyTex-1 for Windows, it's 338 MB uncompressed. It is _huge_ in my book.

uncanneyvalley 2y ago

Matryoshka virtualization

bmacho 2y ago

> Strangely enough, I think the LaTex distribution qualifies, too. I tried to install it recently, and it wanted 1 GB of disk space! That's multiple times the size of the entire system disk when LaTeX was created... There is the TinyTeX distribution, which is smaller. (Despite its name, it isn't tiny, or small, or medium in size, but it is also large. But smaller than the default LaTeX distribution with all the possible packages, source code and documents.)

mickmcq 2y ago
My impression is that TinyTeX downloads required packages on the fly and can be quite tiny if you don’t use many packages.
- bmacho 2y ago
  Well here in the project readme there is a table with the sizes: https://github.com/rstudio/tinytex-releases https://github.com/rstudio/tinytex-releases (a bit outdated, they didn't refresh it). I downloaded TinyTex-1 for Windows, it's 338 MB uncompressed. It is _huge_ in my book.