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Comment by ecuaflo | Hacker News Reader

unfortunately in the browser it needs to be downloaded so you’re stuck with indexeddb

It's too bad WebSQL never took off, as that was sqlite built in to the browser.

From memory the wasm binary of wa-sqlite is ~1mb, which is certainly not nothing but is an acceptable one-time download size for many web apps. I've seen websites with single image files larger than that. Not an advocating for more bloated web apps, but a sqlite download might not be a deal breaker.

> unfortunately in the browser it needs to be downloaded so you’re stuck with indexeddb

That argument implies that we're stuck with the browser's single built-in home page because every other web page has to be downloaded.

How is having to download sqlite3.wasm any different from having to download HTML, CSS, JS, images, etc.?

> How is having to download sqlite3.wasm any different from

'unnecessary' file size. K matter on the web still.

I'm not normally a web guy, but from https://sqlite.org/download.html it looks like it's ~800k extra added to initial page load? Based on average mobile speed in US of 97.09Mbps; that's an extra half second added to initial page load. That's not trivial; maybe an extra 15% bounce rate on initial hits.

> ~800k extra added to initial page load?

If you're serving it uncompressed, which no production-grade site will (for a given definition of "no"/"none").

> K matter on the web still.

Not, i opine, for the types of apps which want to host client-side databases. These are client-side applications, not "web pages."

Even a bare-bones, database-less google.com is now 3.14mb uncompressed (1.32 compressed), and that's not counting the pieces which uBlock Origin keep from loading. It loads somewhere around 2MB (uncompressed) of JS.

Last i checked, gdrive downloaded some 14mb to get up and running.

> that's an extra half second added to initial page load. That's not trivial;

We'll have to agree to disagree on whether half a second extra initial-hit-only load time is trivial.

> If you're serving it uncompressed

That 847 KB is actually the size of the (compressed) zip file, but it does contain other files. The compressed WASM + the JS to load it is probably about 500K, depending on the specifics of compression & minification.

Makes me laugh. When I got my first computer in 1987 it took so long to load a small game from cassette that I could go downstairs, boil a kettle, make a cuppa, and bring it back to my room, and the game would be just about finished loading. Now people are moaning about an extra half a second lol

How things change.

No, the narrative here is that things used to be fast and idiot JS devs have made everything bloated and slow.

Computers are thousands to millions of times faster. So yes, that's a true assessment.

> millions of times faster

Unless you had a 3KHz processor (and no processor ever had that), that statement is just not true.

It's not about raw clock speed, or a Zen 4 would be as fast as a Pentium 4 :)

It's a matter of use case - for simple web page or even a lightweight client-side app, maybe too big. But for tool with heavy data processing, I could see it being quite useful.

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