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    Full installation of Windows 95 - ~64MB
    sol.exe - 167KB

    jre-9.0.4_windows-x64_bin.exe - 96.6MB (compressed)
    Solitaire.jar - 463KB

It seems that even a VM containing all of Windows 95 would be smaller than a JRE and this version of Solitaire.

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Not to complain too much on a praise worthy effort, but it would have been so nice if this was coded in FreePascal with Lazarus. Then we would have tiny native binaries for all the desktop platforms, which would feel even more native.

I saw a launcher in Task Manager today using 96MB of RAM. Its only job is to launch another app.

For a couple of years I programmed on a device where ALL the apps combined had to total less than 8KB.

Can we explain what this memory does? Is it just abstractions ontop of abstractions etc?

The app simply has an image and a button that says "OPEN" on it, which launches the other app.

I'm guessing it is Electron or something and underneath it is loading an entire web browser engine to display the image and the button.

That's right, but we have to remember it's not really useful to optimize for binary size or RAM usage for a software that does not need multiple instances on servers, it's an end user app that you only need one of.

I think Java is a nice choice for a Solitaire game. If you're looking for efficiency, take a look at my command-line Solitaire that you can play in Gitlab pages or in a terminal : https://gitlab.com/rpigab/solitaire-cli

It's written in Rust so by design, it should be blazingly fast wink wink. Well there are many ways to shrink the binary, I didn't try to yet, the WebAssembly part too is way bigger that it would need to, but still, it's smaller and there's less colors, shapes and animations to display.

... that sentiment is how we ended up requiring 1GB of ram for sending text...

A slight tangent but it is kind of mind melting that smartphones now do need a minimum of 1GB just to send an SMS. I mean look at any Nokia phone form the 90's and none of them probably had more than 1MB of RAM, many way below that. Yes there is a lot of quality of life and security features but the bloat is real.

Is that true or just hyperbole? On what system?

I love working towards making systems as efficient as possible, but in real life, engineer hours are limited and compromises exist.

Also, if this is quantitative, we could make the same argument with 1MB, and 1KB, and less. Sending text doesn't require RAM at all, it requires carrier pigeons.

Instead you end up with 20 Java microservices each taking up a gig of memory

Nevertheless it's just such a delightful gulp of fresh air to open the repo of a GUI app and see it's not in JavaScript :-) An Electron instance with the same would probably take even more memory, wouldn't it?

I recently build some internal app with Qt. Unfortunately, building Qt apps on Windows is somewhat complex.

Also I didn't find a way to install Qt on Windows without later receiving E-Mails from Trolltech (or The Qt Company, nowadays) trying to sell Qt to me.

> Also I didn't find a way to install Qt on Windows

pip install pyqt5-tools gets you everything incl the designer :-)

It may fail building though.

Developer should have used jlink to get smaller distribution package, alas it would still be bigger.

OTOH - I wonder what the size of native binary would be

It would be an interesting exercise to try the port using WxWindows or something similar

wxWindows?

Called wxWidgets now https://www.wxwidgets.org/

That is because they haven't bothered to use jlink.

Shipping JRE isn't a thing since Java 9, other than for folks stuck in old Java ways.

Imagine an Adobe version of this. 64Gb at least.

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