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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

Marginally related rant.

Why on earth is the macOS download a 153 MiB ZIP file that expands into 363 MiB of stuff? Why does every Electron app have to come with its own copy of Electron? I miss the times when Windows came on seven 1.44 MB floppies and you did not even need all of them because they mostly contain drivers for hardware you didn't have. Actually I don't miss the time, swapping floppies was annoying.

But really, is the amount of space, bandwidth and clock cycles we carelessly waste really justified by the gain in productivity and achievable complexity?

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> But really, is the amount of space, bandwidth and clock cycles we carelessly waste really justified by the gain in productivity and achievable complexity?

Yes. Space, bandwidth, CPU cycles are cheap, especially for this sort of application. Developers are expensive.

Sure, that is the standard response, but multiply the waste by the number of users, the costs that you externalize by making them pay for faster hardware and more storage and bandwidth.

Is it though? You're probably running on something with plenty of spare clock cycles and extra RAM. It's not like end users are suddenly paying a real cost for extra ram usage when the next electron app comes along.

A couple hundred megabytes on a terabyte or larger harddrive? Who cares.

But why do I have those? My notebook could cost $10 if 640 kiB of RAM and 1 GB of storage were enough. I am of course not expecting that everything should work on a system from 30 years ago, we really made use of more powerful systems to do things that were impossible before, but I think we could still do a lot better.

Sure, but then your software would cost a lot more to develop and you'd have to pay for that. TANSTAAFL and all that.

Sure, as a smaller company, this makes sense. And if they stay small, and want to minimize cost, fine. If they target tech-people, again, fine. But in my view, mass adoption really requires better UX/perf.

Tauri seems like a low to the ground competitor to Electron. Binaries start at a couple MB. Completely cross platform. Rust.

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