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.
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The use of Go will definitely do that, as it prefers to statically link everything.
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?
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…
That's a lot of code, though. I can't imagine common libraries so big. The Linux kernel is less than 100mb.
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".
The neat thing about code is that there's no upper limit on how inefficient one can get.