I'm constantly torn between these two perspectives. Practically speaking, 6mb is fine. Ideologically, not as much.
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 today's computers did things a million times better, or did a million more things than 25 years ago, I'd agree with you, but from a user perspective a modern computer is not really all that different from a Windows 3.11 machine. The screens are bigger and we have Internet now, but the experience of, e.g., writing a letter in Word is basically the same.
The screens alone are responsible for a lot of size increases (framebuffers in RAM, high res media) but also, unlike in Windows 3.11, modern Word allows you to mix English, Japanese and Arabic in a document, allows use of a screen reader, and has a thousand features that you personally don't need but everyone has some set of features that they use, and taking away any of them would offend someone.
And me thinking I already was able to do that with Word on NT 4.0 and Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
Re:Thoughts on Rust bloat
by mwcampbell on Wednesday August 21, 2019 @09:32PM
(#20763813)
But what if GUI applications that were considered lean and mean in the 90s were common on today's hardware? Wouldn't those applications be really fast and light on resources?
Re:Thoughts on Rust bloat
by littlestymaar on Thursday August 22, 2019 @01:58AM
(#20765076)
Fast and light on resources isn't the same thing: a GPU-accelerated GUI toolkit is going to be bigger than a full software one, but also much faster on modern hardware.
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.