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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but when it's a binary you only do it once, at which point seconds (or even a couple minutes) become mostly a non-issue.

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Spoken like someone who doesn't know/remember using a slow connection...

It doesn't matter what you or I remember. When we talking about optimizing _binaries_ for size, we're talking about saving kilobytes maybe a megabyte or two.

That has no effect on how long it takes to download it, but help with:

- Less dependencies to follow

- Maybe even benefit from instruction cache

- Shorter compile times

- People don't laugh at you when you have half gigabyte of binaries to start an rds instance and create a user in it. (wtf hashicorp?)

- Smaller attack surface

- Som now started to target WASM as secondary target and then suddenly it's not web, but also web

I grew up on <1mbps internet and still managed to download 8k+ mp3s and hundreds of movies. It was slow going, but my expectations were low given that's all the bandwidth I'd ever had, so I wasn't frustrated by it until I tried 20mbps one day.

<1mbps is still broadband.

Folks are stuck with 24.4k still, over noisy radio signals or unmaintained copper lines.

On a slow connection (and particularly, a slow & unreliable connection), a couple meg file can take hours to download completely. This is a problem with the internet, not with the web. And, that's if you get the right binary in the first place (rather than needing to redownload a different version due to version-specific dependencies).

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