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Comment by SMP-UX | Hacker News Reader

Swift means it'll require LLVM.

QT is bloated and resource intensive. Most of us don't want gigabytes of data being spent on special effects.

What is your definition of bloated? My note-taking app (with animations) binary is around 89MB[1][2]. And this is without statically linking it, using `-optimize-size` and `-ltcg` flags and running `strip` and `UXP` on it which should make it even smaller.

[1] https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor#8-performance

[2] https://get-notes.com/

I'm not OP, but 90Mb for a note taking app is incredibly bloated.

Exactly. People think it's okay to waste memory just because.

Well, it's not a simple note-taking app, it has a Block Editor like Notion, tho it's written in QML and C++ so it's very performant. Compare that to most Electron apps these days, and it has a way smaller binary size, way more performant, and uses much less RAM. I do aspire to trim its binary size down further, I just didn't put my attention on it yet.

It's always about choosing the best compromise, I just think Qt is a very good one . It allows you to target many platforms with a declarative UI (QML) and a compiled language (C++ or other bindings). It's a superb form of abstraction layer compared to web apps.

I'll grant you that in a world where a chat app like Discord is >400 Mb, this is on the smaller side, but that just goes to show how low our standards have become.

But then consider for a moment that the entirety of Windows 95 is ~100 Mb installed.

> but that just goes to show how low our standards have become

I totally agree. We need to do better. But I still stand with Qt being a good option. There are ways to lower Qt apps binary sizes down to 11MB[1] or 8.3MB[2].

[1] https://www.qt.io/blog/reducing-binary-size-of-qt-applicatio...

[2] https://www.kdab.com/qt-quick-without-a-gpu-i-mx6-ull/

Qt hails from the era when software was routinely measured in megabytes, so it's designed with that in mind. I suspect that it's QML specifically that contributes the most bloat in this case.

Nedit takes like 6M on a Linux machine.

Older and lighter toolkits like fltk are better.

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