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Comment by charleslmunger | Hacker News Reader

A weather widget using 8 bit color plus alpha on a 4k display show three full size images in 100mb. But I suspect that's not the ux we're talking about here, and a widget style system has no excuse.

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Apple's Weather app has an animated background, glassy views, and nice animations like water droplets on the glassy views when it's raining. So rendering all that on a 4k or more display at 10bit depth is going to consume a bit of RAM. However I guess it can surely be improved to make it consume less RAM.

https://wttr.in/ shows it's very possible.

The display on that page is literally broken for me, the boxes are all misaligned. It seems like it can't handle Japanese text correctly. Properly working localization in dozens of languages is one of those things that adds "bloat" to modern software that was missing in the bad old days.

Unicode doesn't require 100s of megs.

Vector icons. It can be fit under 50MBs.

Those still have to be rasterised to a pixel-based frame buffer at render/compositing time.

Yes but that space would have existed anyway for a window of that size regardless of its contents.

Use an svg.

Or render everything using css, 100mb is someone not trying. 1gb is absurd abuse that only domestic violence victims put up with.

Quite a tasteless metaphor, no?

SVG is an on-disk format. It has to be rasterized, otherwise how do you have pixels? Each pixel takes up memory.

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