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Comment by westoque | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand the obsession with small binaries and compiled packages. I care about usability and user experience. If it takes 5mb to have a smooth experience then I’m all for it.

It’s funny how we now have fiber having 1GB/s internet speeds and we rant about having 1MB size package being too big. Also, everyone’s moving to 4k now with even bigger transfer/data requirements.

tldr; 1mb should be a non issue as long as experience improves.

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> It’s funny now that there’s fiber having 1GB/s internet speeds, we rant about 1MB size package.

Half the people in the world probably struggle to have access to a 10 Mb/s connection. Even I go to places with connections that are tenuous at best.

(I'm the Flutter TL.)

Yeah, I was just writing a design doc earlier today and my math for how big a download we could reasonably expect users to wait for was based on a 5Mbit/s download speed. Half a megabyte takes under a second at that speed, but 5 megabytes takes more like 8 seconds. That's a huge difference. In an environment like the Web, where ephemerality is the norm, you really have to stay below 1MB from what I can tell.

All of this takes memory. Also i do a lot more than use some crappy flutter calculator.

India. Next billion users.

Size matters a lot.

Also please consider how many seconds will it take for a cheap Android phone to parse 5 Mb of JS (and how much memory it would take after parsing, which can be up to 10 times more that original code size). I think it can become much more than 8 seconds, and during parsing the browser will likely become unresponsive.

Should try all your Dev and browsing on a 2gb low end Chromebook, and last gen lower end phone for a couple months. Then see how you feel about it all.

I develop apps for tvs, so size and performance matters a lot since they are a lot of tvs already shipped with low end SOCs. newer ones are more powerful, but people doesn't change tv as frequently as phones.

I think there’s a middleground there that if you want to support these countries then there should be a framework for this (Flutter Lite?).. But if you want the complete feature set that is “bloated” but has good ux/ui support then that should be fine as well.

"these countries"? I've seen schools in the US with 15 mb/s My mothers, Xfinity, has a low tier, 25mb/s.

A lot of Australia is still stuck on ADSL with speeds of 5 - 20Mb if your lucky

(I'm the Flutter TL)

Our current plan is to support the complete feature set while still supporting places with connectivity around 5Mbit/s. We are still in very early stages (we only just put out the tech preview today!) but we have some confidence that this is possible. Personally I'm more worried about the performance of layout animations (e.g. resizing paragraphs) than about download size, but again, it's early days still.

It's not just the transfer... It's the compile, load and perceived speed. 1mb compressed and gzipped can be a hundred MB parsed and in memory. Which isn't bad on a modern mid level desktop, but it's crazy on a lower end smart phone.

There are also other factors to consider. I'm not huge in premature optimization, but damn.

I don't think it's the actual file sizes that people object to so much as all the redundancy and inefficiency that the bloat is indicative of. That is, for every increase in CPU, storage, and bandwidth; app developers insist on throwing it away with another layer of frameworks and intermediary libraries.

What Moore's Law giveth, React/Flutter taketh away...

There are smaller/faster ready like libraries such as preact and inferno btw. React does offer a lot of advantages though mostly for diagnostic purposes for developers.

Faster speeds for some do not equate to faster speeds for all. This applies doubly so when bandwidth is metered and may cost the end user more money.

Abstraction for the engineer should not come at the expense of the person on the other end of the wire.

I disagree. I think Ruby/Rails is a good example of this. They maximize on developer happiness but that doesn’t stop users from using a bloated rails app. Take a look at GitHub/GitLab as an example of a Rails app I guess?

I don't see how end users suffer from using Rails. Server side rerponse time is a very small component of page load time for most websites. It's different from being forced to download and parse megabytes of JS, which consumes CPU, battery and time.

Not to mention your data plan

There's more CPU time across 1000 users' browsers than on the server. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to minimize your load at both ends.

The difference is who pays for the load.

And now that developers make the visitors pay for the load (through their electricity bill, and also through their mental state), they don't give a shit about how much the users will have to pay - and thus how much electricity will be unnecessarily wasted on a global scale.

No offense, but you sound like Verizon charging Netflix for what users are pulling down.

I haven’t used rails in about a decade. Is the bloat of a typical rails app on the user’s machine?

Not everyone is so fortunate to have 1GB/s internet.

Waiting for a page to load is a terrible user experience.

Outside of a select few cities, getting anything more than 100 mbps down is literally impossible unless you have the budget to pay a company to run fiber to your home (at least tens or hundreds of thousands). And outside of major cities, 10 mbps might be the best you can get.

Not to mention there are a thousand situations even inside of the major cities where a few mbps (if that) is all you can muster.

I for one hate pages that take minutes to load... and it happens a lot more than you’d hope.

...in the US? Here in Europe I’m paying 30 euro/month for 200 megabit down (just 20 up, though), and I live in a 50k people town.

Even in London I think some places only get 10Mbps

I'm getting 32 mbps from BT for £52.49. My O2 mobile internet hardly works at all. London really has terrible internet infrastructure. I wouldn't be surprised at all if some people got no more than 10 mbps as you say.

> London really has terrible internet infrastructure.

I think it probably has average infrastructure shared over too many connections. If I do 4G speed tests up north, it's always way faster but there's also way fewer people trying to use it concurrently...

>I think it probably has average infrastructure shared over too many connections.

Which makes it indistinguishable from terrible infrastructure :)

More people sharing the infrastructure also means more people paying for it. So in terms of value for money London's internet infrastructure is terrible even by your very lenient definition.

My old place was getting 12-16Mbps over ADSL despite being only 400yds from the exchange. Fibre improved that slightly to 20-25Mbps.

(New place has 1Gbps fibre - average is about 300-350Mbps during peak times, 800Mbps+ in quiet times.)

I have gigabit internet and the web is still dog slow. It got a good bit faster when I started blocking third party garbage, but it still doesn't feel any faster than it was in the early 2000's, despite that my internet is literally 17,000 times faster and my computer is also tons faster.

This has also been my experience, uBlock origin improved performance on many websites (and also clues me into how many unnecessary connections by analytics and tracking servers are made by so many sites). It is mind boggling to see sometimes 250+ blocked requests on the badge for a news article.

Yeah. I started very aggressively blocking all third party stuff and then I manually whitelist things as needed. Its crazy how many requests some sites make, for stuff that has no impact on the content I actually want.

Test on a phone, anything over 1MB will lock up the script parser for a few seconds.

The irony is, the same people complaining about 500kb are probably the same people using a 100MB+ terminal emulator built using a web browser (i.e. hyper).

You don't download the entire app every time you change directories like you do navigating between sites in a browser.

If you're sending JavaScript down the line with every request, you're doing it wrong and should give up your career.

When you go to a new website, it doesn't download anything?

NEW website. As in, ONCE and FIRST TIME.

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