Hacker News Reader

Comment by thinkingkong | Hacker News Reader

The whole “small footprint” thing is always weird to me. I understand that lots of people really want to squeeze efficiency out of every single kb but Im struggling to see where this is helpful. A single image, a single pixel from the marketing team, the actual application code, the page, etc are all going to dwarf the framework.

View on HN

Coming from living in third world countries where I had to ration data transfer, at speeds ranging equally from 50kbps to 1mbps, I appreciate these efforts greatly

The framework is fundamental for all the rest of the stuff. You transfer it before the majority of the site's content. The faster it arrives, the faster your site is usable. It's also always in use. A badly sized image can cost a few MB, but that's a trivially addressable problem on one page of your site. The framework being 10x its required size is a huge development hurdle to overcome.

Your local mom-n-pop laundry place's website probably doesn't need these types of efficiencies, but if you're running a large ecommerce site, time-to-interactive is an important metric which can cost a lot of money.

I worked at a startup where we reduced the app size by moving to preact from react. The thinking was that it would be beneficial for the low powered mobile users but what we actually saw was increased retention and engagement from all segments as the app was a lot more snappier and didnt chug on every click/tap

I had until very recently a limited data plan for my cell phone in Europe, a plan similar to the one most of my friends have. The only websites that remained reliably accessible once I'd hit the 2Gb limit were HN and i.reddit.com (RIP). 90% of all other websites just time out.

If anything, I wish we could force the marketing team to compress their images better.

Tangetial: I'm not a huge dwm/suckless guy, but I have it on my Raspberry Pi. I love how instantaneous everything feels. Compared to 14-core, 32GB work laptop running Windows which I will forever loathe because how slow and buggy everything is. Same for websites (e.g. HN, libreddit vs reddit etc.)

It’s about execution cost, not size over the network.

I think this is why, for me, the future of JS are resumable frameworks like Qwik and Marko 6 – you get all the benefits of NextJS + React (composable UIs, state management, server-side code, etc) with no hydration, which is a big cause of sluggishness with web apps.

Your code only executes when needed, and only that specific chunk of functionality.

Not necessarily. Lots of jpegs go below the 1 mb mark (and tons of framework are bloated like crazy)

I think you misread the title. The framework is 0.9kb, not 0.9mb.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com