"There are very little tools available to to help the user select unbloated software"
Actually there is a whole community around this http://suckless.org/
Software bloat makes me sad
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Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#12Software bloat as such doesn't make me sad.
Free open source software bloat makes me sad.
However, that bloat is winning on its own merits. For instance, GNU/Linux distributions which are minimal are not popular. The popular ones tend to be the bloated ones.
Vim has gotten a lot bigger in 20 years, yet I'm not going to jump ship to a smaller vi implementation.
FOSS makes us confront the fact that we actually seem to like bloat. We inflict bloat upon ourselves --- there is no monopolistic software vendor there to blame.
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#13Atom is designed to harness community participation from a community that currently embraces some technology that can easily lead to bloat.
So ti's a tradeoff. On the margin, many more people are likely to write a halfway decent Atom extension than learn elisp and write one for emacs.
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#14The 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'?
Fair point. I suspect that that subtlety to the rule is often lost to the reader. Perhaps a rewording is in order that puts emphasis on the conditional part (i.e. what constitutes premature)
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#15point 2 about atom:
Well, writing a text editor is far more complicated than it seems at first place.In order to support big files (50mb logs for instance), you need to make all your code rely on complex memory management, streaming and caching. Maybe js is not the right tool for the job in order to implement these features. I always thought that atom should be build in Qt with an api that can interact with JS,a bit like Adobe products for instance. That way you still allow JS plugins, just like Photoshop while getting a max of perfs thanks to C++.
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#16>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 th…
I could edit a doc with a word processor that could fit onto a floppy, and it worked well. Now, why does the same task require a multi GB pos bloatfest to do the same job? And oftentimes, more slowly!
Imagine for a second, the power of today's hardware running optimised lean code. It could be so good, but we accept bloated crappy bug ridden shitfests of OS and application software. We seem to care more about glossy and social then performance.
It is a real problem.
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#17Atom and Vim (and imo even Ubuntu) aren't good example of software bloat. While they might be slow and use a lot of memory, they're usually shipped with basic functionality and more functions can be added and removed at any time. Good examples are iTunes, Office, iOS and Android (the latter two are usually shipped with non removable bloatware).
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#18Related: great article on code inflation https://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/issue...
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#19That'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 just don't agree.
One of the best features I found in Golang was the statically linkage concept. There is just to much trouble with tools that come either in dozens of versions for different OS versions (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, CentOS .... all Linux, but no Linux is the same Linux ..., it goes on: Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, 14.x, ..., Debian Sid, Debian with and without systemd ...)
While statically linking might add some bloat, I don't see, that the real bloat-factor is because of this. The real bloat-factor for example comes from programs that rely to much on template libraries (yes, I mean C++), that just unroll everything into new statements and because many even simple tasks have a multitude of solutions in the code ... each aside each other. When hundreds of developers are developing on one application, many of them invent the wheel again ...
Re: Software bloat makes me sad
#20"Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. If that's what you need, you've got options..."