- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
You must log in or register to comment.
It kills me when I download a simple app to my phone that’s 60 mb. When I was a child we built the world off 1.44 mb floppies. How did we stray so far from God’s light?
Even 10years ago, I considered having an app over around 40mb to be huge, but now 60mb is kind of the norm
Isn’t it about a web engine being roughly 60MB? 😕
Amen, we didn’t have fancy “game engines” or “media assets” and we liked it.
The Uber App on my phone is 1 GB!
The fuck?
Hmm…
AliExpress has no right to be that large, neither Opera. No reason to store that much cache. Also, I set F-Droid to keep cached apps for 1 hour, what the hell is this?
I kind of forgot to manage my storage, as I usually do until I have like 5GB left…
Data will always adapt to storage size.
Why is it in the 2000’s it took 30-60 seconds to open, Word, Photoshop, Gimp or some other program. With today’s computing power it still takes 30-60 seconds to open same said programs… Also fuck MS Teams.
And then you have Arch Linux. [insert chef’s kiss]
Curious if this is so broadly true without bundled resources; obviously screens are higher DPI, so even buttons are now designed for at least 8K resolutions, even if most consumers are still on 1080p.
Orders of magnitude beyond 640x480 or pre Windows 3.1 resolutions.
Cause they work better. Brand new ads, awesome new subscriptions. Flashy new AI features that definitely work super well and are definitely useful.
/s
Electron is the devils own pile of shit
ads, tracking, and the use of shitty bloated frameworks (like electron) so the tech bro owners can save time and money.
There’s sort of an unholy synergy between hardware companies wanting to sell more hardware and software shops wanting to cut development costs. The selection pressures are to build bloated software that needs fast hardware to run.
Because storage is cheap, so it’s not worth optimizing that heavily for, because the optimization creates a huge amount of headaches.
There’s a reason that today you can just download an app, and it just installs, runs, and uninstalls itself cleanly.
There’s no fighting with dependencies, or installing versions of libraries or frameworks before you can install an app, or having apps conflict with other apps, or having bits of app installations lying around conflicting with things.
That’s because we used to spend a lot of time and effort making sure that only a single copy of each dependency was installed on a system. If two apps both relied on the same library, one would install it, and the other would then be dependent on it as well and not install its own copy. If the original is removed you have a problem. If it thinks something else is dependent on its asset still and doesn’t remove it when it should you’ve got a problem. If they were both dependent on different major versions of a library, you could run into conflicts and compatibility issues (hello dll hell). Either the apps would have to manage all that, or the OS would, or eventually the user often would.
Now every app just bundles all its dependencies with it. It means the app comes as a clean bundle, there’s no conflicts, it can install cleanly, and there’s so much less time spend on packaging apps and debugging various system configurations.
Quite frankly this makes way more sense as a model for distributing anything. Yes it costs more in storage, but it pays off massively in resiliency and time savings for everyone.
Also, unless everything is done with vectors, high def image / video assets are not small and can very quickly add up.
Except that it’s not just storage, but also increased memory footprint and CPU usage in a lot of cases. Take something like Slack which is a huge resource hog.
Electron. Many apps nowadays are just headless browsers and browsers are huge and complex. It’s nice from a development perspective, because you can (re)use web tools for desktop apps but it’s very resource hungry.
It’s worth noting that it doesn’t have to be that way. Take Tauri as an example of leveraging the benefits of web stack development, and having an efficient runtime under the hood.
Yes, and now you can’t test your application before shipping it because who knows what browser engine will actually run it.
You could develop it on Windows and have it completely break for every single Mac user when it executes in Safari and have literally no way of knowing or testing that ahead of time.
I mean you would just test on each platform, which you should be doing regarding of what you’re developing with. Also worth noting that web standards are a thing, and vast majority of apps aren’t so complex that they would run into edge cases between browser engine implementations.
However, this isn’t an inherent problem since you could build something like Tauri and package its own lean rendering engine with it. Sciter-js is an example of this approach. Other examples can be seen with React Native and Proton. The main point here is that the bloat the Electron brings to the table is wholly unjustified, and far more efficient approaches are possible.
It’s also because we started doing shit like using JS in places it really shouldn’t belong. Half the programs on my PC are just webapps running in a sandbox environment, instead of using systems languages like C/C++ directly like was the case 15-20 years ago. Abstractions on top of abstractions on top of abstractions. JS was fine for embellishing elements of a web site, it should have never been turned into an app language.
Bingo!
No we wouldn’t, and this is an asinine take when like half of Linux runs on interpreted python.
You’re min/maxing for things that don’t matter. You know what does matter? User facing features. You know what language in questionably the fastest to produce user facing features in? JavaScript.
If you want to optimize for performance you can do so after by moving things server side, writing them in web assembly, or offloading them onto other threads.
You can thank the hackers for bloating our stuff with security patches (among others)!
And by that you mean spyware, trackers, and ad platforms baked into the apps?
Nah its mostly nuget packages. And everything has more dependencies now, including all the dependencies 😅
nuget packages? is that what we can node_modules these days?
Nuget is dotnet’s package manager
Lmao, I guess I wasn’t too far off.
