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Yeah the other reference point I sometimes think about is the old windows IRC client mIRC. mIRC was super fully featured - it supported downloads, scripting (I

Yeah the other reference point I sometimes think about is the old windows IRC client mIRC. mIRC was super fully featured - it supported downloads, scripting (I think it had its own embedded scripting language), colors, and all sorts of other wild things that I never learned to use. It had way more features than modern discord, although it was missing discord's voice chat, video chat and screen sharing. (And it obviously didn't have any of the modern encryption algorithms). I downloaded it over my 56k modem and if I'm remembering right, the download was around 2-3mb.

jeroenhd 2y ago
Programs like mIRC benefitted a lot from the hundreds of megabytes of Windows libraries that the OS shipped with. These days applications all seem to ship their own copy of every system DLL so they can work on every platform without having to support different APIs. As a result, mIRC only worked on Windows. If mIRC is all you need, mIRC still works just fine. It's still maintained, so unlike ancient versions of MS Office, you can be reasonably safe while using it!
- josephg 2y ago
  > Programs like mIRC benefitted a lot from the hundreds of megabytes of Windows libraries that the OS shipped with. Hundreds of megabytes is overstating it. Windows 98 was 175mb for the entire OS, including the kernel and all included applications. I doubt the windows UI library of the day (winforms, gdi, etc) totalled more than 20mb. (But please fact check!) And, I don’t think browser engines like electron do ship their own system dlls. Dlls are only relevant on windows - they won’t do you any good on Linux or macOS. And windows always comes with those dlls. I’m pretty sure chrome on windows still makes use of a lot of the underlying windows APIs to render content on webpages in a system-native way. It just has its own layer of heavily custom UI code layered on top. But yeah, it’s cool that applications like mirc still work. It would definitely be a fun project to make a Spotify client or something in zig using winforms. It would be a fun exercise to make something so small.

jeroenhd 2y ago

Programs like mIRC benefitted a lot from the hundreds of megabytes of Windows libraries that the OS shipped with. These days applications all seem to ship their own copy of every system DLL so they can work on every platform without having to support different APIs. As a result, mIRC only worked on Windows. If mIRC is all you need, mIRC still works just fine. It's still maintained, so unlike ancient versions of MS Office, you can be reasonably safe while using it!

josephg 2y ago
> Programs like mIRC benefitted a lot from the hundreds of megabytes of Windows libraries that the OS shipped with. Hundreds of megabytes is overstating it. Windows 98 was 175mb for the entire OS, including the kernel and all included applications. I doubt the windows UI library of the day (winforms, gdi, etc) totalled more than 20mb. (But please fact check!) And, I don’t think browser engines like electron do ship their own system dlls. Dlls are only relevant on windows - they won’t do you any good on Linux or macOS. And windows always comes with those dlls. I’m pretty sure chrome on windows still makes use of a lot of the underlying windows APIs to render content on webpages in a system-native way. It just has its own layer of heavily custom UI code layered on top. But yeah, it’s cool that applications like mirc still work. It would definitely be a fun project to make a Spotify client or something in zig using winforms. It would be a fun exercise to make something so small.