Hacker News Reader

> Look you can claim that "having the necessary metadata for garbage collection and reflection in a statically-compiled language takes up a significant amount of space" but without clear evidence of how much space that is, with proper accounting of byte usage, this claim is non-falsifiable and thus of doubtful value.

The article made the claim that 70% of space is wasted "dark bytes". The article should prove the claim, which it did not. It's an extraordinary claim that really requires more evidence than just an off-hand napkin calculation and talk about mysterious "dark bytes".

It takes very little time to write up something that's wrong.

It takes much more time to write a detailed rebuttal.

What you're doing here is pretty much the same trick quacks, young-earth creationists, and purveyors of all sorts of pseudo-scientific claims pull whenever they're challenged. Any fool can claim the earth is 6,000 years old. Proving that it's actually several billions years old requires deep insight in multiple branches of science. People stopped doing this after a while as it's so much effort and pointless as they're not listening anyway, so now they pull the "aha, you didn't falsify my claim about this or that bullshit I pulled out of my ass therefore I am right" zinger and think they look Very Smart And Scientific™.

But that's not how it works.

Also just outright disbelieving people like this is rather rude. You're coming off really badly here and your comment has the strong implication that Russ is outright lying. Yikes!

> The article made the claim that 70% of space is wasted "dark bytes"

This is incorrect. The claim is that the bytes are either non-accounted, or motivated by technical choices specific to Go.

> What you're doing here is pretty much the same trick quacks [...]

Look the article has some measurements with numbers which you can readily reproduce on your own computer, and the methodology is even described. The main claim is that "it's unclear what these bytes are about". The previous claim that they were "non-useful" was retracted. The data is there, and there's a question: "What is this data about?"

The text is even doubling down by spelling out "there's no satisfying explanation yet".

> outright disbelieving people like this is rather rude

We're not in the business of "believing" or "disbelieving" here I think? There's data, there's measurements, and there are explanations.

After my comments and that of others, Russ provided a more elaborate, more detailed (and at last, falsifiable in the positive, epistemological sense of the word) explanation deeper in the thread. Now we can make the work of looking into it and check the explanation.

> your comment has the strong implication that Russ is outright lying

Your understanding is flawed then? There was no assumption of lies implied.

> The claim is that the bytes are either non-accounted, or motivated by technical choices specific to Go.

That's not what it says; with "70% of a couple hundred megabytes are copied around for no good reason" written in bold no less:

> That’s right! More than two thirds of the file on disk is taken by… bits of dubious value to the software product. > > Moreover, consider that these executable files fly around as container images, and/or are copied between VMs in the cloud, thousands of times per day! Every time, 70% of a couple hundred megabytes are copied around for no good reason and someone needs to pay ingress/egress networking costs for these file copies. That is quite some money being burned for no good reason!

> That's not what it says [...]

That claim was retracted a while ago already on the original version; the syndicated copy on the crl web site will be updated at some point.

So you did make the claim, but just retracted it, in spite of you saying you never made the claim, a claim which is still in the article linked here. I am now supposed to argue against some revised article published elsewhere? This is a very vexing way to have a conversation.

This is also a trick peddlers of pseudoscience pull by the way. Honestly, you're coming off even worse now and this is reflecting pretty badly on all of CockroachDB to be honest. I don't know what your relationship with CockroachDB is exactly (if any), but it's on their website, and it's not a good look. If I was a manager there then I'd back-pedal, unpublish the entire thing, and issue an apology.

> a claim which is still in the article linked here. I am now supposed to argue against some revised article published elsewhere?

The article linked in this thread is a syndicated copy of an original article published elsewhere, as clearly stated by the attribution section at the bottom. It's reasonable to expect that changes to the original will only be updated in the copy with a delay.

This is nowhere near reasonable. You said that "the article made the claim that 70% of space is wasted dark bytes" was "incorrect" with no further details. Only when pressed and provided the quote where you literally said exactly that did you start talking about some retraction.

But whatever, this is pointless. Russ was right and it's hard to take any of this in good faith. It feels like you're going to great lengths to avoid saying "oops, I was wrong".

> You said that " the article made the claim that 70% of space is wasted dark bytes" was "incorrect" with no further details

I wrote this because there was no mention of "waste" anywhere in OP.

> Look you can claim that "having the necessary metadata for garbage collection and reflection in a statically-compiled language takes up a significant amount of space" but without clear evidence of how much space that is, with proper accounting of byte usage, this claim is non-falsifiable and thus of doubtful value.

I respectfully disagree. I believe there is value in pointing out the false claims in a long blog post even when there isn't time to write a full-length rebuttal.

Go has a complete accounting of what all the bytes are. You can read them for yourself in the compiler, as it is open source, and trace through where every byte comes from, if you like. It isn't exactly in a broken down table precisely to the specs of what knz42 wants, but the info is all there. There's nothing hidden here.

Oh, you don't want to do that? That's not a surprise. Neither do I. Definitely not on my agenda today.

But I'm not making wild accusations. If you're going to, you probably shouldn't be surprised when we're not exactly impressed.

The compiler is all open, and as such things go, fairly easy to read. "As such things go" is definitely doing some heavy lifting there, but, still, for a compiler of a major language, it's a relatively easy read.

The vague intimation that there's something hidden and sneaky going on is hard to give much credence to.

> As explained in another comment below, it's a good thing when all the byte usage is represented in the ELF section headers or the symbol tables.

It's an ELF binary; all that's relevant are the program/segment headers and dynamic table. The section headers and non-dynamic symbol table are just there for orthogonality and to make the debugger's life a little easier (and the debugger would much prefer DWARF data and doesn't care about the section headers, tbh)

You are getting ridiculous at this point. Probably some things could be done to improve the binary size, but the maintainers of Go don’t have unlimited time. Russ showed that Go is not growing binary sizes. Your article is misleading and at best poorly worded. When you add more code your binaries get bigger. Is that a surprise to you? If Go binary size is a critical concern for you, you could be helping solve the problem, but you are just complaining.