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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Just because that window shifts over time doesn't mean that we need to push our boundaries for acceptable program size, nor is it an excuse not to optimize our software. This kind of mindset is how we end up with terminal emulators that take more than 500ms to launch, and how we end up with systems that take on unconscionable amounts of bloat. I use Konsole as my terminal, which is a 50kb binary. If your replacement is orders of magnitude larger than my current option, it had better brew my coffee and have bacon ready by the time I wake up every morning. Instead, all we got was a lousy authy sync.

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Konsole is not actually 50kb, you need to include the libraries it imports to do an apples to apples comparison. What is going on here is tabby is the equivalent of statically linked + a virtual machine OS called a browser, while konsole is not. To properly compare the two, you need to compare source code size, as if you downloaded tabby and ran it an browser. To really compare them properly, you'd also need to make the typescript compiled into equivalent JS VM assembly. There you'll find them probably to be significantly closer in size

Sharing libraries with other apps is a feature.

>Konsole is not actually 50kb, you need to include the libraries it imports to do an apples to apples comparison.

No, we really don't, because these libraries are available to other programs as well, whereas a huge packaged application is availabe to nothing than itself.

Correct, shipping the equivalent of an entire full-featured GUI OS just to provide a terminal emulator is crazy.

Konsole itself could probably be considered bloated. You can easily write a super functional and performant terminal emulator in 50-100K by only using the external dependencies that are absolutely required - i.e. on Linux, the POSIX/Linux syscall interface and Xlib. You shouldn't even need libc, but AFAIK on Linux it's extremely hard to not use it, for stupid reasons.

> To really compare them properly, you'd also need to make the typescript compiled into equivalent JS VM assembly.

That's like saying, to compare Usain Bolt and myself in terms of sprinting performance, you should consider the fact that I'm chubby for a fair comparison.

http://st.suckless.org

More text? :-)

(I know of the suckless community and of st in particular (I've never tried it)).

See, this is what I mean by a legitimate criticism. I agree that a new version of a critical tool like this should do a bit more than have tabs and sync.

"It is 250MB" alone isn't.

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