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Comment by Aperocky | Hacker News Reader

The article is the question though, the question deserved to be asked.

And Gmail deserve to be shamed for shipping almost a gigabyte of stuff for a mailbox. Wouldn't be surprised if they accidentally/intentionally built the whole youtube client in there.

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I think this might be closer to the truth than you might think.

Due to the absence of (cross-app) shared libraries on at least iOS, developers often end up building big company-internal libraries that then have to be shipped with all of their apps.

Tree shaking isn’t perfect, and the result are these > 0.5 GB monstrosities.

Is it plausible that the libraries are so big? I mean, for example, NodeJS is in the order of 100mb and contains the whole v8 engine.

The Gmail app size has to be assets, right?

Static linking will do that. Imagine you have 400mb of binary objects your app depends on. Libraries your company uses for app analytics, SSO, 2FA, Corporate service bus api, etc. You statically link all those for your 50mb Swift UI app and bam, you’re in the 700mb range.

The use of Go will definitely do that, as it prefers to statically link everything.

https://go.dev/wiki/Mobile

If we had an entire POSIX OS built with Go, then we would be back to statically-linked UNIX prior to BSD.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/golang-statically-and-dyna...

can you build a Swift UI in go?

There is a single mention of Swift on the developer page that I posted.

"Note that you can also invoke GoHelloGreetings from Swift by importing Hello."

  @import Hello
  // ...
  let msg = Hello.GoHelloGreetings("gopher")

Oh lord…

That's a lot of code, though. I can't imagine common libraries so big. The Linux kernel is less than 100mb.

The neat thing about code is that there's no upper limit on how inefficient one can get.

It's literally "work expands to fill the available time" (s/time/cycles and memory/)

That would be the source code. The default debian kernel is around 12 MB but it could be much smaller.

It doesn't bundle full random external libraries compiled with debugging symbols and "whatever other stuff".

You'd be surprised what ends up dragged into where when you have a build system that makes it easy. Just look at the npm.js mess (and what kind of things ended up depending on what kind of other thing) if you want an example.

It's one thing to have common internal libraries and another thing to have the compile process blanket include everything that's in it.

On Android, Gmail reports as being under 200 MB. So I agree, they probably include way to much for portability.

On Android, sharing code is much more feasible than on iOS as far as I understand it, especially if you're Google and can demand that everybody using your apps has Play Services installed.

For what it's worth, Outlook for iOS on my iPhone has an executable that weighs in at 368.8 MB.

Google needs to trim some stuff down.

Apple Mail on macOS is 16-30MB, so something is still clearly of.

To be fair, Apple is the only developer in the world that can ship (cross-app) shared libraries on iOS, so they have a bit of an advantage.

> Tree shaking

Modern development is insane to me. "Let's do it badly, and hope a tool can fix it for us."

"Is anyone keeping an eye on the tools? No? Perfect!"

Particularly for developers inside the company that owns the platform. At some point they have to recognize they've completely screwed all this up.

Tree shaking is insane to me too. Just use a language that can actually do proper DCE, if you're not building a website.

(I do realize though that most "apps" are just websites without the browser toolbar, unfortunately)

It is also a conferencing app. That might explain some of the size.

I've been using gmail since the early beta days and was never aware of this functionality. But on closer inspection there appears to be a highly stylized (unrecognizable) camera icon there that takes me to, I guess the long lost cousin of Google Meet?? Why are these apps welded together? What a bizarre decision. I thought Meet went to The Graveyard along with Allo and Duo and Wave.

Meet was discontinued; its functionality was merged into Duo and the resulting app renamed to Meet.

Meet still works on Pixel phones as a solution/parity for FaceTime. I wonder if it's bundled in the web build or they're the same build under the hood.

My work uses GSuite so I’m using Meet every day. I find it mildly useful to have the functionality built into the Gmail app but at the same time I see zero loss in having it be a separate app.

That's something that I would (very generously) expect to add 5 megabytes.

The background images alone would be more than that.

We don't need that to be pre-loaded on the device, do we? how often are they used? and when one is set to be used, the user is definitely online already, just grab the one then

Yeah, meet and chat (where each has their own bloat) are now integrated into the mail app as well. This contributes a lot.

Why? It’s obviously not a problem for them

Gmail started by giving 1 GB of free storage to users as a carrot. Over 2 decades later, how much does it really matter if the app goes from 70% of that down to even 10% of that, and would that outweigh what else people actually want to see done instead?

I mean, it's certainly not anything to boast about from a technical perspective. I just don't know whether it's really enough to warrant any shame for the product though.

Deserves.

It's quite common in UK English (and maybe others, I don't know), to refer to "singular" or collective non-people entities (such as companies, I know Gmail itself isn't one) using the plural form of verbs.

This isn't in my natural speech, but I quite like it; it seems to kind of imply "the people behind [company]" rather than anthropomorphizing the company itself. ...generally though I think it's just colloquial convention and not that deep.

I wonder how this language quirk changes how people think about the statement "a corporation is a person".

There's something funny about someone trying to be smart and pointing out a typo or some other minor irrelevant error only to be proven completely wrong.

He isn't wasn't wrong, and the parent post wasn't even correcting him. Gmail is not a corporation, it is a product - singular.

Gmail is a product, but the comment wasn't saying "Gmail the product deserves to be shamed... ", more like "the Gmail team/devs/company deserves to be shamed...", which is why the plural still made sense to me (given the omission of an explicit "team"). The singular makes sense to me too.

In any case, I wasn't really interested in correcting or proving anyone right or wrong, just pointing out an interesting linguistic detail and where the grammar may have come from.

Can you "shame" a product, though? Obviously not. So you're shaming the people who built Gmail, the organization - hence the plural form is acceptable.

Ironic.

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