Windows 3.11 required 4MB of RAM and the whole install took <20MB of disk space, and that's the entire OS with all of its utilities and libraries.

A typical smartphone ships with around 10,000 times this much storage capacity and enough RAM to hold it 100 times over.

The fact that it can hold that much does not make it right to waste resources. To contrast, video or audio is a good use of the space it takes up in general, because there has been and continues to be research in compressing that data, and it's pretty close to being as small as it can practically be. Apps are not a good use of space because we know roughly what the lower limit is --- and the current average is a few orders of magnitude more than that.

Sure, and the moon landing used computers with less processing power than your kids calculator. That doesn't mean we should use those to put people on the moon over faster hardware.

Does the fact that older, slower and smaller hardware and software once existed mean we should spend time, resources and potentially sacrifice features to... what? Hark back to the old days where we had 128kb of memory and hard disks the size of vinyl records?

A 6mb GUI app _is_ impressive for right now. At some point in time it would have been absolutely massive, and the way it's going, at some point in the future it may well be absolutely minuscule. And that's not a bad thing.

In general, complexity is indicative of a poorer design, and the fact that an entire operating system + utilities can be delivered in a comparable size to a gui app is hard to look away from.

The author says, "Once you accept bloat, it’s very hard to claw it back". The fear is that bloat increases at higher rate in proportion to its capability and computing power.

I'm cognizant that I'm very much in the minimalist camp with regard to computers, so I do make sure to peek outside and remind myself that stressing about an executable size is a bit unwarranted. But that being said, we must remain vigilant!

If you want to use windows as an example. Why not take the current version? It uses what like 16GB for a basic install (I wouldn't know, I don't use it)? Compare the 6Mb GUI framework to that.

Just go at any iOS or Android conference discussing user monetization.

APK/IPA sizes are the number one reason why consumers uninstall software and the reason behind the ongoing module format efforts from Apple and Google.

I have written GUI apps that could fit in a floppy.

> discussing user monetization

Monetization must be a much bigger reason. A lot more users would angrily uninstall an app that showed them a giant full screen ad.

You think that because nobody cares about bloat anymore, so everything else is large.

For example, I keep Facebook off my phone, and when I need to download it (for example to rsvp for an event) the app is ~100MB, which means 1> I can’t even do it unless I’m on wifi and 2> it’s slow even there.

I’m having trouble understanding the practical impact of 6MB. Many web pages are larger than that. Even on the Mac I bought in 1994, that would have been a reasonable size for an application (and it only shipped with 120MB hard drive).

But maybe I’m missing something. Some folks have mentioned CPU caches which is interesting — is that the problem?

We already could use Turbo Pascal (OWL), Delphi (VCL) and C++ (VCL, MFC, OWL) on Windows 3.1 and deliver applications that could fit on a floppy.

Win32 isn't actually all that bad and getting simple GUI programs with icons under 10KB is completely doable.

Thinking that GUIs need to be 6 MB or painful is a complete false dichotomy.

It's _worth_ it to trade 1mb, 10mb or 100mb of app size in some cases. That's why you don't hand-craft your "simple 100kb guis" in assembly and have them only be 1kb. Exactly the same principle applies here.

Plus, realistically, users don't care. Not one bit. That's why Slack is out here capturing the market, while some other lightweight and exquisitely coded 10kb tool written in C isn't. Because they are shipping features the users want and iterating fast on their memory hungry and bloated platform, while the other one segfaults when there is an unencountered error.

I disagree. I develop an audio workstation - https://ossia.io ; the total size is between 50 and 100 megabytes depending on the platforms. It uses Qt and LLVM and is itself around 500kloc so I'm already around the lower limits of what I can do.

My users, & much people on the internet keep comparing it in size to Reaper, another DAW where the binary is around 10 megabytes (https://www.reaper.fm/download.php) - but they wrote their own gui toolkit and language interpreter.

http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/05/29/cross-platform-gui-trai...

One thing I wondered about Qt is if there's a way to trim out anything an app doesn't use. Have you seen anything like that?

Along with the following shell command :

    grep  --only-matching --no-filename -R 'include <Q.*>'  | cut -f2 -d' ' | sort | uniq

You can say users don't care about bloat and speed, but when they have an alternative that is clearly not the case. uTorrent destroyed the market share of other torrent clients by being lightning fast and tiny. Chrome captured market share off of being fast. IE originally killed Netscape because it 'loaded' much faster. Winamp won because it was fast and tiny. Google won because it loaded fast and the searches were fast. Google maps won because it was full screen and still faster than MapQuest. People hate the Reddit redesign because it is slow and bloated. People like hacker news' interface because it is fast. People upgrade their phones to see dramatic speed differences. A major advantage of apple is their faster CPUs.

When users have no choice, they put up with whatever bloated nonsense they have to. When they have a choice, they do actually go with interactivity and less latency.

You can be patronizing and pretend that it's archaic to care about well made software that doesn't take up 100x the resources it should need, but when someone wants software that gets out of their way, scales well, or runs on a low power platform, that 300 MB chat client isn't going to cut it.

Also, iteration speed is something else users care about.

I don't really see the difference between 5mb and 20mb bins. And I'm a fan of minimalist OS systems like Archlinux with a slim set of running services. Disk space isn't really the main concern besides as a symbolic measure of cruft. No system is ever going to fill up space by having too many OS/terminal programs installed.

But I also don't come from the nostalgic Unixy C programming world. Just a Unix user. So I may be biased.

You are speaking about _latest_ Pis.

Besides that was an example, I have plenty of other IoT and embedded style hardware and they are all fitting this criteria.

Simply put the size of binaries has never been a real concern for some time now and the few rare cases where it might matter probably aren't worth all the effort made obsessing over sub 50mb bin size.

99%+ of it will be people who "feel" like it should be small, without any good reason.

India, China, Africa. Huge, huge markets. Slow, old, crap hardware and networks. Do the math.