Software bloat makes me sad
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Software bloat makes me sad
1–10 of 165 posts
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#2That's pretty much the only reason I cringe every time somebody writes a piece of client code in golang.
While I really like the language itself, statically linking everything is creating exactly what this article describes.
Burn karma, burn. I don't care.
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#3The notion of 'premature optimisation is evil' is partly to blame; It's not a terrible rule, but it's much better with conditions applied. i.e. apply some intelligence/judgement to where you use optimisation rather than just lazily following some rule.
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#4The notion of 'premature optimisation is evil' is partly to blame; It's not a terrible rule, but it's much better with conditions applied. i.e. apply some intelligence/judgement to where you use optimisation rather than just lazily following some rule.
Isn't that intelligence/judgement wrapped up in the interpretation of 'premature'?
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#5I'm not really convinced. Leaving aside the argument about whether or not software is 'bloated' at all, or what 'bloat' actually means, this in particular stands out:
“wouldn’t it have been easier not to create the problem in the first place?” It would seem obvious that the answer to this is indeed “yes”.
It doesn't seem obvious at all, especially considering the implicit assumptions about whether or not bloat is actually a problem. There are three classic examples highlighted in the article of writing about this tradeoff: "Make it work, make it right, make it fast", "Premature optimization is the root of all evil", and "Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth" – but the argument about why these don't apply is a bit weak: "bloated software simply makes me sad".
To be honest, I don't find we've got a problem, generally. My experience with my computer is that I can do many more things much faster than I could in the past. And I don't think that counts as bloat.
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#6That's pretty much the only reason I cringe every time somebody writes a piece of client code in golang. While I really like the language itself, statically linking everything is creating exactly what this article describes. Burn karma, burn. I don't care.
I dont really understand the link between software bloat and static linking...
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#7That's pretty much the only reason I cringe every time somebody writes a piece of client code in golang. While I really like the language itself, statically linking everything is creating exactly what this article describes. Burn karma, burn. I don't care.
Not gonna burn your karma, however:
a) You are failing to account for the bloat caused by the presence of the dynamic linker, the dynamic loader, all the code that must operate under the assumptions of a dynamically linked environment, and the various auxiliaries used to treat shared library hell issues like WinSxS and libtool.
b) Most modern static linking implementations do things like sharing of text segments across processes and other dedup techniques, so they're not actually that bloated at all.
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#8That's pretty much the only reason I cringe every time somebody writes a piece of client code in golang. While I really like the language itself, statically linking everything is creating exactly what this article describes. Burn karma, burn. I don't care.
Not gonna burn your karma, however: a) You are failing to account for the bloat caused by the presence of the dynamic linker, the dynamic loader, all the code that must operate under the assumptions of a dynamically linked environment, and the various auxiliaries used to treat shared library hell issues like WinSxS and libtool. b) Most modern static linking implementations do things like sharing of text segments acro…
So maybe my comment stems from ignorance.
Are you saying that two Golang projects sharing the same (large, for the sake of the argument) dependency would not take (size of the dependency * 2) on i.e. the Ubuntu live CD (as was the example in the fine article)?
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#9You are not alone. See, for example, suckless.org.
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#10>The usual counter to this is that the actual (as opposed to imagined) bottlenecks will only become apparent after intense usage.
The usual counter is that "optimising" takes time. And all of the time that you're spending trying to optimise before release is time that no one is able to use your software at all.
And the reality is that a lot of the bottlenecks can't be predicted in advance - who knows how may files the average user might want to load into your system, or whether your website is going to attract 100 or a million users a month? And many expected bottlenecks become largely irrelevant as technology moves on.
Take his Ubuntu example - for what percentage of users does the fact that it doesn't fit on an actual CD really matter any more? Is it worth spending weeks or months fine-tuning the distro to a point that it can be fitted onto a medium that most people probably aren't even using anymore?