Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

silisili

It's why I dove into Go.

This definitely took me from the 'eh, kinda cool project' to 'I cant wait to try this out immediately' camp.

The binaries are pretty huge, hoping they can bring that down in time.

View on HN

> The binaries are pretty huge, hoping they can bring that down in time.

I'm surprised the numbers are as high as they are and hope they can reduce them... but they'll never get down to the kind of numbers Go and Rust get to because Bun depends on JavaScriptCore, which isn't small, and unless they're doing some truly insane optimizations they're not going to be able to reduce its size.

FWIW QuickJS is a tiny JS runtime by Fabrice Ballard... that also supports creation of standalone executables: https://bellard.org/quickjs/quickjs.html#Executable-generati... though its runtime speed is considerably worse than JSC or V8.

For 90% of things this will be used for, it's more than enough so it might be a good default unless you enable a `-Ojit` flag when building more complex applications where the JIT will be a benefit. In fact, startup times might even be faster.

The challenge of course is supporting two JS runtimes within the same codebase.

Yeah I suspect the weird little differences between runtimes (e.g. what language features they do and do not support) would lead you down a path of a thousand cuts.

It still feels like a graceful idea, though.

JSC is ridiculously fast, this is what makes bun great

It really depends on what you're doing. If 95% of your code is file or network I/O then it's really not going to make the slightest difference whether you're running JSC, V8 or QuickJS. If your code is enormously complex and benefits from JIT then yes, you're going to really feel that downgrade.

The difference in real world performance between web servers written in things like Python or Ruby to those written in Go, C# or even lower-level languages like Rust would indicate that's an over-estimation of how much IO dominates total runtime, even if it is by far the slowest part.

Why is JavascriptCore so big? What's going on internally to end up with binaries that big?

> but they'll never get down to the kind of numbers Go and Rust

Can we please not put the two next to each other? There is absolutely nothing similar between the two.. why don’t mention go and haskell, or go and D instead?

You've been able to do this with Deno for a long time (and Node too, as of recently). The downside is it bundles all of V8 so a "hello world" binary ends up being at least 70mb.

I've been desensitized by my world of 500mb docker containers.

Docker containers are actually smaller if they share layers with other containers in the system. A ton of containers based on the same image reaps many deduplication benefits.

Yeah, I notice many/most images are based on a recent Debian base if they aren't on Alpine or closer to bare images. I don't consider even Alpine as a base too bad for a lot of apps.

Have you tried using alpine based images instead of debian/ubuntu/others? I know it's not always possible especially because of musl but for most things it works fine and is tiny.

It becomes a political issue at this point w/ battling the ops team. I have more important battles.

Yeah that's fair, if it works it works.

Depending on your setup it doesn't really matter anyway.

how about ubuntu chisel

If it's a battle by all means avoid it. But it's weird that your ops team would care about the image type. The whole point of containers is that they don't need to care.

I guess I should have said infra and not ops. But cost cutting has interesting implications on responsibilities :)

If everyone is on the same base image, then you aren't really dealing with 500mb images, but much smaller layers on top.

Why even include Alpine? Distroless is the way to go.

Yeah, this is honestly one of the things that turns me off of containers in general.

Like, the whole point was to effectively use linux kernel namespaces with cgroups in an intelligent way to give VM-like isolation, but non-emulated performance - and supposedly not having to deal with image size bloat from the OS like you get in VMs.

What we got was an unholy mashup of difficult to debug, bloated images and ridiculously complex deployment and maintenance mechanisms like kubernetes.

I just do old school /home/app_name deployments with systemd unit files, and user-level permissions.

Oh, and it's webscale[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

It doesn't HAVE to be that bulky or complex. You have a lighter space like Dokku or just direct scripted deployments pretty easily. As to the size, you can use debian-slim or alpine as a base for smaller options. There's also bare containers, or close to bare for some languages and platforms as well (go in particular).

What's even "lighter" is a single binary sitting in /home/app running under "app" user and launched by systemd unit file with auto restart.

Look, I totally get the unholy hell that's (for example) python dependency management, and containers are a great solve for that.

Sometimes you don't have a choice of technology, so I get it.

What I don't understand is folks that use containers for stuff like go binaries. Or nodejs. I mean, it's just an "npm install". Or now bun with it's fancy new build option, you don't even need that.

I honestly don't get the point of containers with languages that have good dependency management, unless you're in a big matrix organization or something.

Or, as one HN user put it years ago, "containers are static compilation for millennials".

I snorted beer out of my nose the first time I read that.

It feels like the same people who make this argument are also using the other side of their mouth to lament that nobody uses containers for their original purpose of containerization. And yet, that's a legitimate use case that is totally orthogonal to any build process or artifact distribution method. In fact the argument itself betrays a misunderstanding, because the underlying complaint is about using Docker images as a build artifact, but it's presented as if containers are the problem. But they're separate concepts (you don't compile a container, so the snarky analogy to static compilation is nonsensical upon closer inspection).

There are plenty of good reasons to containerize even a single binary executable, as demonstrated by the fact that officially maintained images exist for containerizing processes like Postgres or haproxy. Sure, you could run both Postgres and haproxy as services directly on the host, but then you'd miss out on all the benefits either provided by or complementary to containerization, like isolated cgroups and network namespaces that make declarative service orchestration easily achievable with maintainable configuration.

> I totally get the unholy hell that's (for example) python dependency management, and containers are a great solve for that. [...] What I don't understand is folks that use containers for stuff like [...] nodejs. I mean, it's just an "npm install".

With Python it's just "venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt".

All the tools needed to create an isolated environment (venv) and install packages (pip) come with the standard Python distribution these days. I wouldn't characterize that as "unholy hell".

Now wait two years, run the same command, and see what happens.

What are you implying will happen?

Using the built-in tools, you can save the exact versions of dependencies (i.e. a lock file) using "pip freeze >dependencies.txt". This should give you the exact same set of packages in two years' time.

If you want to be even more sure, you can also store hashes in the lock file. This has to be generated by a separate tool at the moment [1][2] but can be consumed by the built-in tools [3], so "pip install -r requirements.txt" is still all you need in two years' time.

This is also explained in the pip documentation [4].

[1] https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/4732

[2] https://pip-tools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#using-hashes

[3] https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/topics/secure-installs/#hash-c...

[4] https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/topics/repeatable-installs/

You get a lot more from containers than just dependency management. You get isolation options for everything related to i/o from disk to network. As well as hard CPU/Memory controls. It's a few steps above what you get with chroot, etc.

There's plenty to like about containers.

`-trimpath -s -w` makes binary size smaller.

`xz -z -9e` is good to compress it for distribution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com