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Comment by jscholes | Hacker News Reader

> Simply drag-and-drop your files to make it instantly available for your clients. The next time they start your application it will self-update to the latest version.

How does the latter half of this work? Specifically, if I haven't modified my app to incorporate your service, how does running it trigger the updater? I assume some sort of wrapper executable?

If the above is correct, how much overhead does that wrapper add? What happens if an update is available, but the user's internet connection is slow/down? Will my app be allowed to run while updates are checked for in the background, and if so, do you fire a message telling the user once an update is known to be available? Or just silently restart it?

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Yes, you are correct, Pakkly adds a thin wrapper to your executable which is built with Rust to be as lightweight and fast as possible. This wrapper adds virtually no overhead besides taking up a bit of memory (around 8mb).

Update checking only happens on startup, currently. Your app performance will not be affected. In case the server is not responding during startup Pakkly will continue, after a brief delay, executing your app. The startup update check will fire at most once every 60 seconds (In case someone starts your app in quick succession).

Update notifications are planned, but these will be optional, and will never stop your app for you.

Kids these days - calling 8mb “a bit of memory” :) (yes indeed it’s not that much these days but I remember when 8mb was enough to run a multitasking OS with a ton of high-end applications.

That particular figure makes me think of the derisive backronym for emacs ("Eight megabytes and constantly swapping").

(Long-time emacs user here)

back then IT was not the workhorse of 95% of modern life, and only a handful of physicists needed computers for very niche usecases that needed next to nothing in resources

You can run a fully functional voip and chat client within that order of magnitude (Ripcord) whereas the 'real client' (Discord) doing the same thing is 10x that.

Don't downplay the resource wastes on nothing of value.

I'd understand if this were about something taking half a giga of ram like too many applications do nowadays. But this is a wrapper adding 8mb of ram. Your efforts should be re-directed somewhere else.

Right? I left it out of my recent thread about BREW development, but we were actually worried because our first app took up 120KB of phone storage space!

Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27220657

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