https://erock.prose.sh/my-love-letter-to-front-end-web-devel...
I do wonder what's going to happen with the use of WASM, I doubt it's going to produce libraries any smaller than ELF, so are people going to try and use caching tools like indexeddb to avoid repeated downloads (and is that the next key bit of tooling to arrive), or are we going to burn our mobile data just so people can avoid building native apps?
As a side note, I find the numpy comment quite interesting: I'm guessing the ~30MB is based on the wheel? It looks to me (based on the size of numpy in Debian) that ~1/2 of that is shared libraries (e.g. BLAS) which isn't part of numpy. There's also things like: f2py (which helps wrap Fortran libs for use in python), which is just over 1MB; tests including test data, which looks to be about ~5MB; and SIMD support which is almost 2MB. I suspect there's other things you could strip out which would make the size smaller to make things more comparable to front-end work (I've noticed on shared systems that the size of people's conda installs is comparable to my container with a full dev environment, both doing similar things with python). I do think you'd struggle to get it under a few MBs though, as for comparison the FFTW shared lib on my system alone is 2.1MB (with the static one sitting at 4.3MB), and I'd be concerned if there was a different FFT codebase which was much smaller than that (as you'd start wondering what's been left out/incorrectly implemented).
> Modern javascript code is compiled and that's not going away anytime soon
Absolutely, I think most opponents of this change in the workflow have failed to understand the requirements being placed on developers to push a cutting-edge, performant and platform-neutral service ecosystem.
All of the bullet points listed are why I enjoy web development. I am able to amass a seemingly unbounded amount of knowledge, work on an unbounded number of interesting, varied problems, and have the blessing of being compensated appropriately for my investment in myself. Modern web development is, within all this complexity, an open door to anywhere in the world for those with patience.
I didn't even want to be a web developer when I was young. I wanted to be a game developer. Complexities and salaries were somewhat equivalent back then. Then around 2015 it became clear that web development was becoming a cutting-edge marriage of a wealth of amazing technologies and applications. I really love being a part of this industry, whether or not I despise 80% of it.