News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Mancy: JavaScript REPL by vortico on Friday October 30, 2015 @08:20AM (#10477355)
To prevent 40MB downloads for a REPL, is there a library version of Electron that can be installed globally, so that small scripts can use it to produce full applications?

(My expected response is that Electron and Node are both moving fast enough so that multiple versions may be incompatible. Global libraries tend to work for stable software, so it may be possible in the future for Electron.)

Re:Mancy: JavaScript REPL by princejwesley on Friday October 30, 2015 @09:21AM (#10477582)
I'll look into that :-) Version 2 will be released in three days(Nov 2).

Feature list : https://github.com/princejwesley/Mancy/wiki/Features-&-Roadm...

Re:Mancy: JavaScript REPL by vortico on Friday October 30, 2015 @09:41AM (#10477693)
Would

    npm install -g electron-prebuilt
do the trick for users, while they use a smaller version of your release without Electron included?
Re:Mancy: JavaScript REPL by brownegg on Friday October 30, 2015 @09:20AM (#10477577)
Why do you need to prevent 40MB downloads?
Re:Mancy: JavaScript REPL by vortico on Friday October 30, 2015 @09:38AM (#10477677)
If every package was 40 MB on my computer, my distribution would be 30 GB.

More importantly, these 40 MB of code and resources expand to about 400 MB in memory when the application is running, but a global library wouldn't fix that.

Re:Mancy: JavaScript REPL by coldtea on Friday October 30, 2015 @11:37AM (#10478447)
>If every package was 40 MB on my computer, my distribution would be 30 GB.

Only if you had installed 750 userland programs. Which are quite a lot. And even then, 30GB for your OS + your third party programs is negligible in even a 265GB flask disk (merely 12% of it).

>More importantly, these 40 MB of code and resources expand to about 400 MB in memory when the application is running, but a global library wouldn't fix that.

Not sure where you got those metrics. Code doesn't "expand" on memory, and binary size it's not a reliable metric of how much memory it will use (a trivial 5 line program that just mallocs can use TB of memory).

For the majority of very large programs, most of the size on disk is assets, not compiled code.

Re:Mancy: JavaScript REPL by michaelmrose on Friday October 30, 2015 @12:59PM (#10478988)
You are correct that code doesn't "expand on memory" but there is no fixed relationship between code size and memory usage. You could certainly write a tiny program that uses a ton of memory pretty easily.
Re:Mancy: JavaScript REPL by coldtea on Friday October 30, 2015 @05:20PM (#10480606)
Yeah, I say that: "a trivial 5 line program that just mallocs can use TB of memory".
Re:Mancy: JavaScript REPL by davexunit on Friday October 30, 2015 @10:22AM (#10477953)
400MB of RAM for a REPL!? That's absurdly high.
Re:Mancy: JavaScript REPL by dimgl on Friday October 30, 2015 @11:09AM (#10478276)
The REPL is currently using 20 MB of RAM on my computer, so I don't know what this guy is talking about.
Re:Mancy: JavaScript REPL by vortico on Friday October 30, 2015 @02:53PM (#10479763)
Electron consumes 117MB, npm takes 50MB, and gulp is consuming 114MB, although I don't know how much of this value is shared between the processes (since there are 40+ of them).
Re:Mancy: JavaScript REPL by fiatjaf on Friday October 30, 2015 @08:53AM (#10477468)
That would be great.