Software bloat makes me sad • Hacker News Board

Re: Software bloat makes me sad

#161

Post by tikums » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 2:19 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #131

Twirrim wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fun fact: KDE 4.x depends on ruby in most distros. Do you know why? Dolphin ships with a ruby script to update some folders (don't remember what it does). Nobody runs it. That's it. Why did they allow an additional dependency on Ruby in? It seems like perl or python would be the more logical choice, given they'd already be on the system (heck.. maybe bash?)

Bash would have been more appropriate, yes. I don't think the author of the script even thought it was going to be run by users, but some debian package checker probably flagged ruby as a dependency and there it was.

> Bash would have been more appropriate

A script that is compatible with POSIX Bourne shell (/bin/sh) would be more appropriate. FreeBSD, for example, does not come pre-installed with bash. If you want cross-platform portability, this is a better default.

Re: Software bloat makes me sad

#162

Post by XorNot » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

mondoshawan wrote: post #144

ZenoArrow wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all code bases need to be minimal to be valid. Some people like having the features you class as superfluous. So long as you have the option to choose software that suits your taste there's not really much of a problem. I, for one, am glad that the web continues to evolve beyond its original design, clearly that's not something you're as interested in, both viewpoints are valid.

So my point here isn't that I feel those features are superfluous, but that that including them wholesale into the web browsing application directly is bloat -- it would be better served to produce separate applications specialized for those features. Bookmarks, for instance, can be handled in a much cleaner and portable way than isolating them to the specific browser implementation. The same can be said for history,…

And this is where I'm bored with bloat rants. "Software X is bloated! "

Re: Software bloat makes me sad

#163

Post by prof_hobart » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 9:52 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #157

prof_hobart wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you discover the issues, you don't know which bits aren't robust enough. And rewriting them, along with modifying the rest of the application to use them, takes time and can lead to further unexpected behaviour.

The opposite of that. Using somebody else's code, written for a different app in a different environment, is where most unexpected behavior comes from. Here's the bits that aren't robust enough: any open source that isn't either used by thousands, or used in exactly the way you will be using it.

I would still be mostly using a 3rd part application framework if I rewrote some bit of it that I found problems with. I wouldn't be rewriting the whole lot - that would take forever. So I'd be left with a 95% of the framework being written by the 3rd party and 5% written by my team.

That 95% would still need to interact with my new 5%, and as it was never designed to do that, it could easily introduce new unexpected behaviour. Imagine trying to rip out (for example) the indexing code out of a database because it's performing badly and then rewriting it.

Re: Software bloat makes me sad

#164

Post by JoeAltmaier » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 2:20 PM UTC

prof_hobart wrote: post #163

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite of that. Using somebody else's code, written for a different app in a different environment, is where most unexpected behavior comes from. Here's the bits that aren't robust enough: any open source that isn't either used by thousands, or used in exactly the way you will be using it.

I would still be mostly using a 3rd part application framework if I rewrote some bit of it that I found problems with. I wouldn't be rewriting the whole lot - that would take forever. So I'd be left with a 95% of the framework being written by the 3rd party and 5% written by my team. That 95% would still need to interact with my new 5%, and as it was never designed to do that, it could easily introduce new unexpected…

Imagine having control over the behavior of your code! That's the advantage of writing it. And I thought we were talking about replacing open source packages, not doing open-heart surgery on a faulty package?

Re: Software bloat makes me sad

#165

Post by prof_hobart » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 11:31 AM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #164

prof_hobart wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would still be mostly using a 3rd part application framework if I rewrote some bit of it that I found problems with. I wouldn't be rewriting the whole lot - that would take forever. So I'd be left with a 95% of the framework being written by the 3rd party and 5% written by my team. That 95% would still need to interact with my new 5%, and as it was never designed to do that, it could easily introduce new unexpected…

Imagine having control over the behavior of your code! That's the advantage of writing it. And I thought we were talking about replacing open source packages, not doing open-heart surgery on a faulty package?

Why would you think that? I explicitly said "Apart from the OS (which isn't where the problem lies), there's no open source in it."

It's a 3rd party commercial platform for developing your own applications on. To rewrite individual bits that aren't working efficiently would be a nightmare.

As for imagining having full control over the behaviour of my code - I had that quarter of a century ago or more when I started coding, and spent weeks or months building windowing systems and low-level networking code in assembler that I could achieve in 30 seconds with any off the shelf language these days.

Yes, my code was extremely efficient (it had to be, trying to do graphical comms software on 8086 machines didn't give you much of an option to do otherwise), but the use of my time wasn't.

The third party product that we're using is the result of many years of a large team of dedicated developers. Rewriting that from scratch in order to make sure we've got full knowledge of what's going on is an utter ludicrous idea.