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Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB? by seizethecheese on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @12:55PM (#46515867)
Is it plausible that the libraries are so big? I mean, for example, NodeJS is in the order of 100mb and contains the whole v8 engine.

The Gmail app size has to be assets, right?

Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB? by tgsovlerkhgsel on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @05:40PM (#46519854)
You'd be surprised what ends up dragged into where when you have a build system that makes it easy. Just look at the npm.js mess (and what kind of things ended up depending on what kind of other thing) if you want an example.
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB? by reactordev on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @12:59PM (#46515922)
Static linking will do that. Imagine you have 400mb of binary objects your app depends on. Libraries your company uses for app analytics, SSO, 2FA, Corporate service bus api, etc. You statically link all those for your 50mb Swift UI app and bam, you’re in the 700mb range.
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB? by chasil on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @01:23PM (#46516319)
The use of Go will definitely do that, as it prefers to statically link everything.

https://go.dev/wiki/Mobile

If we had an entire POSIX OS built with Go, then we would be back to statically-linked UNIX prior to BSD.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/golang-statically-and-dyna...

Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB? by reactordev on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @01:25PM (#46516361)
can you build a Swift UI in go?
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB? by chasil on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @01:38PM (#46516535)
There is a single mention of Swift on the developer page that I posted.

"Note that you can also invoke GoHelloGreetings from Swift by importing Hello."

  @import Hello
  // ...
  let msg = Hello.GoHelloGreetings("gopher")
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB? by reactordev on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @02:14PM (#46517074)
Oh lord…
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB? by tormeh on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @01:31PM (#46516450)
That's a lot of code, though. I can't imagine common libraries so big. The Linux kernel is less than 100mb.
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB? by yobbo on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @01:59PM (#46516853)
That would be the source code. The default debian kernel is around 12 MB but it could be much smaller.

It doesn't bundle full random external libraries compiled with debugging symbols and "whatever other stuff".

Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB? by lxgr on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @01:33PM (#46516467)
The neat thing about code is that there's no upper limit on how inefficient one can get.
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB? by HPsquared on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @03:34PM (#46518277)
It's literally "work expands to fill the available time" (s/time/cycles and memory/)