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Some software bloat is OK

(waspdev.com)
50 points senfiaj | 1 comments | 04 Nov 25 08:27 UTC | HN request time: 0.318s | source
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SurceBeats ◴[04 Nov 25 10:03 UTC] No.45809221[source]▶
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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1. sublinear ◴[04 Nov 25 11:53 UTC] No.45809909[source]▶
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.