Some software bloat is OK

Re:Some software bloat is OK by SurceBeats on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @05:03AM (#45809221)

The article is kind of right about legitimate bloat, but "premature optimization is evil" has become an excuse to stop thinking about efficiency entirely. When we choose Electron for a simple app or pull in 200 dependencies for basic tasks, we're not being pragmatic, we're creating complexity debt that often takes more time to debug than writing leaner code would have. But somehow here we are, so...

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by 0xEF on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @05:11AM (#45809272)

Thinking is hard, so any product that gives people an excuse to stop doing it will do quite well, even if it creates more inconveniences like framework bloat or dependency rot. This is why shoehorning AI into everything is so wildly successful; it gives people the okay to stop thinking.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by rossant on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @05:07AM (#45809249)

Yes. Too many people seem to forget the word "premature." This quote has been grossly misused to justify the most egregious cases of bloat and unoptimized software.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by SurceBeats on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @05:11AM (#45809271)

Yeah, somehow it went from don't micro optimize loops to 500MB Electron apps are just fine actually hahaha

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by stared on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @05:39AM (#45809477)

I hope Tauri gets some traction (https://v2.tauri.app/). The single biggest benefit it drastically smaller build size (https://www.levminer.com/blog/tauri-vs-electron).

A 500MB Electron app can be easily a 20MB Tauri app.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by brabel on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @06:20AM (#45809712)

Not sure. Tauri apps run on the browser and browsers are absolute memory horders. At any time my browser is by far the biggest culprit of abusing available memory. Just look at all the processes it starts, it’s insane and I’ve tried all popular browsers, they are all memory hogs.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by peterfirefly on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @09:54AM (#45811682)

Electron apps also run in a browser. They package an entire browser as part of the app.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by dspillett on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @09:54AM (#45811683)

A big complaint with Electron that Tauri does avoid is that you package a specific browser with your app, ballooning the installer for every Electron app by the size of Chromium. The same with bundling NodeJS (or the equivalent backend for Tauri), but that isn't quite as weighty and the difference is which backend not whether it is there at all or not.

In either case you end up with a fresh instance of the browser (unless things have changed in Tauri since last time I looked), distinct from the one serving you generally as an actual browser, so both do have the same memory footprint in that respect. So you are right, that is an issue for both options, but IME people away from development seem more troubled by the package size than interactive RAM use. Tauri apps are likely to start faster from cold as it is loading a complete new browser for which every last byte used needs to be rad from disk, I think the average non-dev user will be more concerned about that than memory use.

There have been a couple of projects trying to be Electron, complete with NodeJS, but using the user's currently installed & default browser like Tauri, and some other that replace the back-end with something lighter-weight, even more like Tauri, but most of them are currently unmaintained, still officially alpha, or otherwise incomplete/unstable/both. Electron has the properties of being here, being stable/maintained, and being good enough until it isn't (and once it isn't, those moving off it tend to go for something else completely rather than another system very like it) - it is difficult for a newer similar projects to compete with the momentum it has when the “escape route” from it is generally to something more completely different.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by Redster on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @10:03AM (#45811778)

Based on https://v2.tauri.app/concept/architecture/, it seems that Tauri uses native webviews, which allows Tauri apps to be much smaller and less of a memory hog than a tool which uses Electron and runs a whole browser.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by cpt_sobel on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @05:27AM (#45809389)

The latest MS Teams update on MacOS fetched an installer that asked me for 1.2GB (Yes, G!) of disk space...

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by thaumasiotes on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @08:52AM (#45811023)

I recently set up a new virtual machine with xubuntu when I stopped being able to open my virtualbox image.

Turns out modern ubuntu will only install Firefox as a snap. And snap will then automatically grow to fill your entire hard drive for no good reason.

I'm not quite sure how people decided this was an approach to package management that made sense.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by xigoi on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @12:44PM (#45813739)

I recently found out that Teams was taking up over 5 GB on my laptop. The incompetence of Microsoft developers knows no bounds.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by bluetomcat on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @05:52AM (#45809548)

And consequently, "you need 32GB of RAM just to be future-proof for the next 3 years".

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by nly on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @05:32AM (#45809432)

Fortunately many apps seem to be moving to native webviews now instead of shipping electron

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by m-schuetz on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @06:01AM (#45809606)

I'd argue that the insane complexity of fast apps/APIs pushes many devs towards super slow but easy apps/APIs. There needs to be a middle ground, something that's easy to use and fast-enough, rather than trying to squeeze every last bit of perf while completely sacrificing usability.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by immibis on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @03:24PM (#45815488)

Java Swing? It was slow in 1999, which means it's fast now. It's also a much more sensible language than JavaScript. It's not native GUI, but neither is JavaScript anyway.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by m-schuetz on Wednesday November 05, 2025 @03:46AM (#45820829)

Swing has no place in a sentence about good usability. It may be the best of the worst, but it's not a positive example. Things like html or Imgui are better to use, with the former also being much more powerful and the latter being as simple as can be while still being blazing fast.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by empiko on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @05:40AM (#45809481)

What is often missing from the discussion is the expected lifecycle of the product. Using Electron for a simple app might be a good idea, if it is a proof-of-concept, or an app that will be used sparsely by few people. But if you use it for the built-in calculator in your OS, the trade-offs are suddenly completely different.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by pjmlp on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @06:09AM (#45809648)

A large majority of Electron crap could be turned into a regular website, but then the developers would need to actually target the Web, instead of ChromeOS Platform and that is too hard apparently.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by Incipient on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @07:44AM (#45810324)

I've recently gone back to more in depth (but still indie) Web dev with vuejs and quasar, and honestly I don't even find myself thinking about "targeting Web" any more - I just write code and it seems to work on pretty much everything (I haven't tested safari to be fair).

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by jtbaker on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @09:39AM (#45811529)

Vue is so good! I've been encouraged seeing more organizations mentioning using it (in the hiring thread etc.) lately.

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by eitau_1 on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @05:37AM (#45809461)

The sad reality is that easy tech explores solution space faster

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Re:Some software bloat is OK by sublinear on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @06:53AM (#45809909)

On the flip side, what you're saying is also an overused excuse to dismiss web apps and promote something else that's probably a lot worse for everyone.

I've never seen a real world Electron app with a large userbase that actually has that many dependencies or performance issues that would be resolved by writing it as a native app. It's baffling to me how many developers don't realize how much latency is added and memory is used by requiring many concurrent HTTP requests. If you have a counterexample I'd love to see it.

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