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App sizes are out of control

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Re: App sizes are out of control

#401

Post by cyphar »

Swizec wrote: post #113
cyphar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the right solution to the problem. Nobody wants libleftpad.so, and as someone who works on a distribution the very concept is horrific (making distribution packages for every three-line package does not make anyone happy). What I think GP was arguing for is that you have libstring.so which you can strip down to just having leftpad or w/e with Kconfig or similar configurations (preferably at link…

Maybe you're not familiar with how it works. The idea is that you do, let's say, "import lodash" then your packaging system says "A-ha! But you're only using these 5 methods!" and only packages those. Behind the scenes, lodash is built out of many modules, but you as a developer don't need to think about that. Because tooling isn't perfect yet, you have the option of helping it out manually and being explicit about i…

Right, but from what I've seen (though I'm not a JS developer, so I might be wrong) is that most projects are not designed like lodash. They are small, single-purpose libraries that would be much better served as part of a module of a larger library. That was the point I was trying to make with the whole "libstring" and "libleftpad" point.

I've seen people try to package JS projects inside a distribution. >800 nested dependencies is simply not sane nor sustainable. The fact that they're small is even less excusable because it means that there was an active decision to not consolidate them into a single dependency that is properly maintained.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#402

Post by throwaway7645 »

sitharus wrote: post #340
throwaway7645 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean "bytecode" or is "bitcode" a thing?

bitcode is indeed a thing, its a file format for LLVM IR https://lowlevelbits.org/bitcode-demystified/ It's not really a bytecode as it's not interpreted, but that's debatable.

I continue to learn more.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#403

Post by yorwba »

real-hacker wrote: post #400

Another question has to be asked: do they have the motivation to reduce the size of apps? Earlier this year, Wechat released a revolutionary (kinda) feature called 'Miniapp', it supports releasing apps within Wechat itself (a bunch of xml/js files). All major Internet companies published their own miniapp in Wechat, which include s the most-used feature of their full app, and only takes less than 1MB of space. Guess…

I'm not sure how your anecdote is supposed to show that users don't care about disk space used by an app, as opposed to not liking one particular attempt to reduce it. WeChat also includes a feature to manage storage space on a per-chat basis, and I have used it before when I ran out of space.

Thing is, some Android users (like me) are at the limit of their internal storage and some apps can't be moved to an external SD card for some reason. Before installing a new app (or indeed just an update), I have to decide which of the hellishly bloated apps on my phone I can delete to free up space.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#404

Post by mikulas_florek »

cakedoggie wrote: post #306

People don't care about app sizes, otherwise it would be an issue. Look at this poster, he doesn't care. He isn't going to remove any of those apps. There are runner apps that are a lot smaller, but he doesn't care about the size of the app enough to guide what he downloads. Empty blog posts are empty. "Why is there so much traffic, someone should do something, I hate driving these days."

How do you know people do not care? There are billions of people with phones without enough space and slow or almost nonexistent internet access. They are just not vocal about it.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#405

Post by Kiro »

abdulmuhaimin wrote: post #362
Kiro wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is the difference between a PWA and a mobile website?

I can say that I use it accidentally without realising(at first) it was a PWA website. So, Im just gonna tell it in layman term. From what I can tell, its a website, but definitely felt more like an app rather than a website. the best way to understand it is just to try it. Its just a website(PWA) pinned to your homescreen, so theres not much cost to try it.

Sounds very diffuse. I can pin any mobile website to my homescreen but I presume that alone doesn't make it a PWA.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#406

Post by verytrivial »

maxxxxx wrote: post #176
joshvm wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens a lot, especially with dynamic linking. I have a project that uses Qt, OpenCV, CUDA, PCL and VTK - fairly standard stack for 3D imaging and visualisation. Since you normally need to bundle dependencies to account for different versions, this adds up quite fast. Qt adds 20MB for OpenGL, 15MB for the VC++ redist, about 30MB for other core libraries. Some stuff in OpenCV requires Nvidia's performance primit…

It's pretty ironic that dynamic linking's main motivation was to eliminate duplicate code and reduce code size. Deploy a DLL once, every software uses it and doesn't have to include it. Now it has turned out exactly the opposite way. If we went back to linking object code together we would get smaller sizes. Instead we have to include huge DLLs.

> dynamic linking's main motivation was to eliminate duplicate code and reduce code size

I'm pretty sure the main motivation is/was to allow patching of dependencies independently from applications. Very popular shared libraries might save space overall, but that is a secondary effect.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#407

Post by userbinator »

No discussion of bloat is complete with a mention of the demoscene, where sub-MB applications generate immensely complex graphics:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848097

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3843427

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

(I'm aware that these sizes do not include the OS and its libraries, but apps on a mobile device also have a similarly rich environment of libraries they can use.)

Re: App sizes are out of control

#409

Post by watwut »

habosa wrote: post #359

I am surprised at all of the app developer shaming in this thread. Is it really likely that every developer working on a popular BigCorp app is an idiot who imports 10MB libraries every time he/she faces the slightest challenge? It's much more likely that app developers are optimizing for many things, including app size, but reducing app size has a bad cost/benefit ratio. Here are some decisions that may bloat your a…

I have seen projects that did not cared about app size. Or rather, app size was priority "super low", because critical and important issues were still open.

It seems that most users don't really care nor use all that many apps.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#410

Post by kmfrk »

I hope someone might take it upon themselves to make a Wall of Shame to let me know which apps I should just uninstall if I rarely use them.

Although the updates aren't always huge, Slack has been an atrocious app on Windows and iOS for performance and indexing. Absurd that the biggest companies have, well, the biggest apps.

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