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Comment by 52-6F-62 | Hacker News Reader

I've experienced and noticed a different problem. I've had the same phone for almost 5 years (have a hard time replacing something that still works well and is in good condition), and I've found it's not the speed that has worsened and I can live with not having certain features to run some new apps; it's the storage.

My phone's storage is not large by today's standards, I have 16 GB. I run fewer apps than I did when I got the phone, and have run the same general collection from day one. I have less music on my phone than I had in the past. I have only had to continually remove applications and music as just about every week it has warned me that my storage is almost full. This only started within the last year. I won't have added anything new, keep my cache flushed, etc and I still have to continually remove items.

Is there something practical I'm missing here, or... ?

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I'm guessing you have an iPhone?

Apps are getting larger due to more and more code accumulating as time goes on and apple's toolkit / compilers causing binaries to become larger.

Swift itself creates incredibly bloated binaries compared to objective-c. More people are using more 3rd party libraries than 5 years ago, where you just used apple's built in libraries for the most part. If you just used the shared system libraries, then that didn't count against your binary size.

You guessed right.

I figured that aging of the tech vs package size would be an issue, including the growing size of the OS... but do you think this is a problem even in long-life applications? I mean, surely AAC and MP3 files haven't bloated so significantly in the past 5 - 10 years.

I haven't worked much yet in Swift and wasn't aware of those differences vs Objective-C, though. That's interesting.

MP3 hasn't changed as a standard or probably as a codebase for decades. Your apps are changing every week, and apps tend to grow in size as more and more code & features are added to them. It's a natural consequence of most software projects.

The binary size of swift projects doesn't catch most people, only large projects with > 400k lines of code as they go over the cellular download limit. It's the new hotness, so many projects are adding swift even if the app is old.

Adding swift to a project adds ~20MB alone for the standard libraries that get included with each app, and each line of swift creates that much more binary bloat. The autogenerated interface between swift and objective C creates even more bloat.

That's an interesting problem. Do you find it's that bad for a new project as well? I've otherwise heard nothing but good things about working with Swift, and it's the only macOS/iOS-specific language I've actually worked with a little bit for its rather quick learning curve.

So I guess the problem is pretty simple, if not immediately obvious for the details of it.

I sigh and guess that means I just have to upgrade soon...

The swift scalability problems start coming up around 70k lines of code, so for the typical case of 1 or 2 developers it doesn't come up. But if you start getting a large codebase:

* indexing will take forever

* xcode will beachball continuously

* the debugger will crash because the codebase is too much to handle

* build times will be 4-5x more than the equivalent obj-c codebase

* startup times will balloon significantly if you have many separate libraries, since using swift forces you to use dylibs. 60-100 libraries will mean 3-5 seconds being added to your app startup time

They are all solvable problems, but it will take several years before they are fixed. But I don't think swift will be better than C++ development, since they are both similar languages as far as compiler tradeoffs go.

I notice some lag even in small swift projects compared to objective-c, but it isn't major enough to worry about.

This happened to me too on an Android phone. It turned out according to the web to be some logfile that keeps growing and which I don't know how to delete -- it doesn't show up in the system-provided views of what's on there. (I'm sorry this is so vague, I'm not interested in Android and it's been quite a while since I gave up.)

It's still running because I deleted all the apps except a few core ones, but I'd appreciate some tips about this too.

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