this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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On another forum, I was complaining about how Microsoft was planning to remove WordPad from Win11. I was advised that installing OpenOffice or LibreOffice was an appropriate replacement. I replied that WordPad was only 3 megs large, as opposed to the recommended replacements, which are decidedly larger.
I guess not everybody appreciates tight code, but I surely do. Things like this are amazingly impressive.
Pick a lane, son.
Proceed to run a 13KB Javascript game in a browser.
Brother, look up kolibri os, then you'll see some TIGHT code
AmigaOS 1.3 or bust.
I will die on this hill.
Menuet OS it is for me
Anyway don't install OpenOffice for any reason, just pick libreoffice or onlyoffice. OpenOffice doesn't get a functional/security/compatibility update since 2014.
I don't particularly care about code size as a user or as a programmer.
Hard drive space is the cheapest thing you've got on a computer.
You could always run gentoo and use -Os ... that can make things a lot smaller but also slower.
I hate this "storage is cheap" mentality, it's a cop out for being wasteful without a reason. "Gas is cheap" was common up to the early 1970s, until it wasn't anymore. "Freshwater is cheap", until it isn't anymore.
Resources are cheap and getting cheaper all the time.
Developers are expensive and getting more expensive all the time.
It's no wonder everything is a sprawling mess.
Are you willing to give up 1080p screens and 16-bit/44.1kHz sampled music? Or how about languages that can't be represented in ASCII, much less Latin-1? Because handling those take up way more space than code.
Let me quote myself:
And there's almost always a reason. Code size tends to be modest compared to supporting data around it.
I see you've never dealt with a real life project that requires god knows how many different libraries off nodejs because 🤷♂️
Dependency hell takes a lot of space.
I have. Still small compared to the images and such that are used in a user facing application.
Edit: just to bring in real numbers, I have an old TypeScript project that results in a 109M
node_modulesdir. Which I agree is absurd. I also have an old anime video, 21 minutes long, at only 560x432 resolution, 24fps, which takes 171M. And that's my point: even in really bad cases, code size tends to be swamped out by everything else in user-facing applications. If there's any kind of images, music, or video, the code size will be a small part of the complete picture.As a point of comparison, in the last place I worked, the main project had over 600MB of javascript dependencies it pulled from node. Plus 300MB of python libraries for Django and whatever else.
At my current job, preparing your environment for development of one "isolated" php system will need at least 3GB of dependencies. Even the main programmer behind it has no clue how it happened or why.
I'd rather have the audio compressed and decompress in realtime instead of a game taking 100Gb in size. Or maybe give me the option to only download languages I can use.
It's almost always compressed in some way. Still takes up a lot of space. You can fit a lot of compiled code in the space of a 1 minute, 128kbps mp3.
You present a false dichotomy. Yes, things like uncompressed audio and HD video take up more storage space, but that does not negate that modern commercial software is very inefficient with how it uses resources. You could improve the efficiency of the system while keeping HD video, it is not a mutually exclusive choice.
For example, booting up Windows and doing nothing takes up 4gb of RAM, while doing the same with a lean Linux installation would take up a quarter of that, despite both operating systems having identical functionality (run web browser, open applications, edit documents, play games, etc).
Does Windows booting take up that much space because of code, or because of data that code is loading?
4GB is what Windows idles at for me, after everything has loaded.
How much of that is cached state based on the percentage of ram available?
Windows takes a percentage of your available RAM, you can boot it on 4GB RAM and it will use 1GB of so
Sure, and there are some performance gains to be made from it I'm sure, but when my OS is doing that and my web browser is doing that and my browser based chat client and my browser based text editor are all doing that, it gets pretty sluggish.
This is why Linux is a godsend for older machines, even running the exact same applications (Firefox, Discord, and vscode) on the exact same hardware, it still feels more responsive on Linux because there is less overhead from the OS itself.
It's an invented problem. A program takes what a program takes. Everyone cares way more about the code being legible, the code being fast enough, and the code not using a ton of memory (and even that last one is kind of shrugged off depending on context).
Applications taking 3mb take 3mb because they do next to nothing or they do it with a bunch of shared libraries ... which is a whole other dependency management mess and wasting a few mb on a drive.
There's also a huge difference between being wasteful of something that pollutes the planet in mass and is not renewable like gasoline (which is the only reason you'd be upset about that now) and wasting a few mb on a drive.
The equivalent of your complaint 3mb vs 200mb is like complaining about a person taking a trip to the grocery store... It's insignificant and often necessary.
You can say that program does way more than you need, but ... nobody is catering to "only what you specifically need" and using the larger program almost certainly covers your needs.
Furthermore, like I already said making things smaller often makes them slower... Since CPU is more expensive to improve, of course things are bigger, that's what more people care about. Some video games take that to an extreme with uncompressed files and 250GB install footprints ... but 200mb?
And then you look at real life and notice that code everywhere is slow, bloated and inefficient. But hey, it's "legible"! To one or two devs, hopefully.
Terrible analogy. A better equivalent is someone renting a garage to store stuff inside and now, because they have so much space, there's that urge to fill it, whether it makes sense to or not.
It's usually the other way around. As a rule of thumb, less code = smaller size = faster execution. In theory, 1k lines of code will require less computation, less processing, than 10k.
That's not true in practice. I mean, that code does exist. However, the vast majority of code is reasonably performant.
Not everyone is an expert at optimization and that's fine ... we'd have a lot less software in general if only the best of the best were allowed to author it.
It would be great if more things went back to native (or at least not "I need an entire web browser for my app to function") that to me is wasteful... But a few hundred MBs for a program as large, complicated, and feature rich as LibreOffice is not.
No, that's ... just wrong. It's not like people are just writing code and leaving it there to do nothing except increase code size or are actively trying to fill the drive.
That's not inherently true, though it is a common misconception/oversimplification. When you do things like code inlining, you increase code size (because you're taking that functions code and having your compiler copy it around to a bunch of places) but the increased locality speeds things up. There's a reason -Os and -O3 are not the same option.
Now sure, if you execute fewer instructions that's better than executing more localized code (though even that can be wrong given process cache and relative instruction speed). Lots of programs have added features that you might not use, but that doesn't really "hurt you", that's not the source of your program or your computer's slowness, it's just some bytes on the drive.
We're a long way from the Unix style "everything is a small program that gets piped into other programs to do interesting things" days. That paradigm just doesn't work for GUI software. Nobody does that because ... normal folks would rather have one office program than have to go shop for 275 programs so that they can have separate programs to edit the document, print the document, convert the document to pdf, update calculations in their spreadsheet, run macros, etc (which if you use all/most of them would likely be more expensive in terms of disk space anyways).
Sometimes a program is slow to start up because it's so boated that just loading it from the disk takes multiple seconds. Wasting a few kB doesn't hurt anything, but if you're doing it thousands of times in one program, your users are gonna have a bad time.
What was it again, 1 critical bug every 1000 loc?
That's why, code as much as needed but as less as possible.
Of course not measured in KB, because readable code takes a bit more space than clever hacks.
Counting in lines of code is the most stupid metric.
Code is rarely the biggest thing in these programs. You want textures that don't look stretched and pixelated at 4K? That's going to cost you.
Look in any game directory. There's probably a one big file--sometimes a few big ones--in there that you can rename to .zip and unpack it as one. It will dump all the textures/sound effects/etc. in the game, but have zero code. It will be something like 70-90% of the game's entire space.
I agree and disagree.
Yes, in Games. There, the longer the more, duplicated assets too (like, all the data in every level package, even though every level only needs 10% of the data). Because user storage is cheaper than optimization.
Sometimes in tools too, often crappy tools with abundance of animations. But usually it's cheaply made software in a framework dragging lots of boilerplate with it. There it's loc again.
No, not in office suites and Wordpad.
Btw, why is vector graphics so rarely used for simple icons?
I just looked at how big LibreOffice Writer is, 210 MB as a portable app... Wow...
AbiWord Portable is probably the smallest and even that is 15 MB installed...
I was gonna say notepad but I just looked and its 18mb. granted I have a few plugins installed though.
Size doesn't matter much when you have SSDs that read upwards of 5000mb/s. It's why we're seeing an advent of web-based apps despite them being woefully inefficient, and why games regularly go above 100gb. The reason file size gets so large is that assets can take up a lot of space and they come with plenty of libraries that they just have to bundle. These "small size" software optimize for size at other costs, like speed, asset quality, development time... Reducing file size is just not relevant anymore and if anything you should be wary of software that do it.
yeah, you know what?... no. This is the kind of attitude that got us here to begin with. Yes, processers get faster, and yes size gets more available. But that shouldn't be an excuse for poorly-written code.
An empty Microsoft Word document is larger than the first word processing program I ever used. That is just crazy when you think about it. but "oh people have lots of resources they're not even using so it doesn't matter", right? When companies have this attitude of "oh the resources are there I may as well use all of them for myself" then their code runs like garbage and you need a faster computer just to make it work halfways decently. And because of this we all end up on this goddamned technology treadmill where we have to keep buying bigger and faster and more expensive computers to do the same thing the old computers did just because the programs written for it are too bloated and the people writing the code couldn't be arsed to make it work well. It wastes our time and our money. I reject that. I think others should too.
This is where you guys lose me, it's just code that not optimized for size and that's because most people don't give a shit about that. People want want their 4k assets, their localization, their accessibility features, their application to run on any device... All this comes at a cost. You want to change things, that's fine, but start by understanding why things are the way they are because shitting on developers won't get you anywhere.
If you're old enough, then the first word processing program you ever used was probably on a screen 640x480 pixels or smaller, didn't support internationalization, couldn't provide true WYSIWYG to match output between the screen and a printer, and couldn't render fonts with anti-aliasing. Which of these features would you like to drop to reduce the size?
Everyone loves "tight" programs until they realize what they have to give up to make it work.
Fonts can be handled by Windows itself.
I don't care about internationalization, just EN-US is good enough.
Having more pixels doesn't change asset sizes when the pixels used per asset are the same. Just show me the smaller button or use vector graphics.