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Comment by sgarland | Hacker News Reader

> 67 MB binary

I hope you can appreciate how utterly insane this sounds to anyone outside of the JS world. Good on you for reducing the size, but my god…

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It's not insane at all. Any binary that gets packed with the entire runtime will be in MBs. But that's the point, the end user downloads a standalone fragment and doesn't need to give a flying fuck about what kind of garbage has to be preinstalled for the damn binary to work. You think people care if a binary is 5MB or 50MB in 2025? It's more insane that you think it's insane than it is actually insane. Reminds me of all the Membros and Perfbros crying about Electron apps and meanwhile these things going brrrrrrr with 100MB+ binaries and 1GB+ eaten memory on untold millions of average computers

The fact that it’s normalized to use obscene amounts of memory for tiny apps should not be celebrated.

I assure you, at scale this belief makes infra fall apart, and I’ve seen it happen so, so many times. Web devs who have never thought about performance merrily chuck huge JSON blobs or serialized app models into the DB, keep clicking scale up when it gets awful, and then when that finally doesn’t work, someone who _does_ care gets hired to fix it. Except that person or team now has to not only fix years of accumulated cruft, but also has to change a deeply embedded culture, and fight for dev time against Product.

Have you looked at the average size of, say, a .NET bundled binary.

Not sure why the down vote(s)... My main work project isn't that big yet, and the bin directory is like 96mb.

Not that I find it particularly egregious, but my rust (web-server) apps not even optimized are under 10mb easily.

The difference is dotnet is both a much more feature complete runtime and a much more performant one. Its not like you're getting all too much with that node runtime - it was, and still is although to a lesser extent, pretty bare-bones.

This packages the entire Node runtime and all project dependencies. It's not that insane.

Considering that you are bundling an entire runtime not meant to be installed independently on other computers, 67mb isn't that bad.

Go binaries weight 20mb for example.

lol, yes absolutely it's bananas. I wouldn't even consider myself in the JS world!

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