Hacker News Reader

Comment by ed_mercer | Hacker News Reader

They're pointing to macOS and saying it uses 5 times less RAM there, but is 230MB for a weather app really something to be proud off?

View on HN

Here is an example of one built using Real Basic on Mac Os system 7+. Probably uses less than 1MB.

https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/snazzy-weather-a-snazzie...

And what's funny was at the time, REALBasic apps were seen as "bloated"

Yes, and this app looks like shit

1. This is subjective 2. It's unclear that "better UI" (by how much) is worth 100x memory usage

For comparison, I installed Gnome Weather and KDE Weather on my Linux system. Gnome Weather uses 150MB and KDE Weather uses 270MB (edit: more like 220MB, seems like 50MB was used in setup but never freed until I restarted the app).

The people who develop this stuff don't know what it's like to have 64 MB of memory. They grew up with 4+ or 2+ if they've been poor. Their dev machines probably have 64 GB. 500 to them is a rounding error. That's why they are proud.

I wonder why it uses 200+ on Mac. It looks like a native (ish) application.

Has a bunch of visualizations and stuff. It might all be graphical assets?

> It looks like a native (ish) application.

Emphasis on the “ish”. It’s an iOS app ported to the Mac (Catalyst), just like Messages, Voice Memos, Clock, and basically every other consumer-focused stock app on the Mac these days.

The thing with ram is that once you can fit everything you want into the space you have available there is little benefit in optimizing further or getting more space. 1gig -> 230MB may be a large enough reduction that it goes from "too big" to "small enough".

2025 and 2026 have proven that to be vastly untrue. It was never true. If it was anything, it was rampant laziness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com