Re:Ask HN: What happened to binary sizes?
by Tanegashima on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @09:09PM
(#14144632)
Case: eBay for iOS
.app package: 112.9MB
Excluding all the frameworks, all the graphical resources, etc.
The binary is a whopping 30.7MB
Okay that it has armv7 and armv8, then again, it's already 15 megabyte per architecture.
And the App is really simple, specially compared to a fully featured web browser like Opera!
Re:Ask HN: What happened to binary sizes?
by vinayan3 on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @09:27PM
(#14144704)
It takes a bit of engineering to cut binary sizes down. It depends on how much they care and the cost they incur by having larger binaries. With building mobile apps you get a prebuilt XCode project and it takes a lot of effort to tinker with it to reduce binary size.
Re:Ask HN: What happened to binary sizes?
by Tanegashima on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @11:02AM
(#14148198)
I understand that.
But how could the executables? You know, the machine code, get so big.
And I'm comparing installers with just the app!
Re:Ask HN: What happened to binary sizes?
by vinayan3 on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @03:24PM
(#14150903)
The machine code can be so big because people put huge strings as constants. As I mentioned cutting down binary size comes from working on the code and understand how the complier translate it into machine codes. The compiler could unravel a loop, inline functions, etc... The compiler is making decisions about binary size vs speed for you. There are ways to tell it not to do that.
What does the ebay app do that it needs different binaries instead of the standard <whatever an android jar> is called?
Re:Ask HN: What happened to binary sizes?
by vinayan3 on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @11:06PM
(#14145153)
APK? Well he's talk about iOS even then on Android you can write native code and compile to armv7 etc... and have optimized binaries for certain CPUs.
Ah, didn't realize it was iOS, didn't know iOS ran on multiple architectures for that matter. Is there a reason (other than incompetence) they don't just publish 2 versions for the different CPU's?
Re:Ask HN: What happened to binary sizes?
by Tanegashima on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @11:04AM
(#14148204)
This is iTunes download.
When the user downloads, he downloads only the version that works with their CPU.
These days apps have to compile for multiple architectures especially on Android. Those are all packaged up together. Not only that these days you have multiple sizes for image assets for various pixel densities. On top of it all these days people rely on a lot of external libraries which may or may not be on a phone or system. You can't depend on shared linking like when developing for Windows back in the day.
Not to mention, fonts. Apps these days package up fonts and send them along too.
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