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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: 0s | 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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rossant ◴[04 Nov 25 10:07 UTC] No.45809249[source]▶
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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SurceBeats ◴[04 Nov 25 10:11 UTC] No.45809271[source]▶
Yeah, somehow it went from don't micro optimize loops to 500MB Electron apps are just fine actually hahaha
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cpt_sobel ◴[04 Nov 25 10:27 UTC] No.45809389[source]▶
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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1. thaumasiotes ◴[04 Nov 25 13:52 UTC] No.45811023{3}[source]▶
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.