No software bloat isn't ok. Tech debt can be ok, and software bloat can be the consequence of tech debt taken on with eyes open. But to say that (some) software bloat without considerations is ok is how we have the fastest machines imaginable and still end up with UI that can't keep up visually with keystrokes.
Quoting Knuth without the entire context is also contributing to bloat.
> Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered.
> We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.
> But to say that (some) software bloat without considerations is ok is how we have the fastest machines imaginable and still end up with UI that can't keep up visually with keystrokes.
Is this actually a problem, though? The blog features a section on tradeoffs, and dedicates an entire section to engineering tradeoffs. Perceived performance is one of these tradeoffs.
You complain about UI not keeping up with key strokes. As a counterexample I point out Visual Studio Code. It's UI is not as snappy as native GUI frameworks, but we have a top notch user experience that's consistent across operating systems and desktop environments. That's a win, isn't it? How many projects can make that claim?
The blog post also has a section on how a significant part of the bloat is bad.
> You complain about UI not keeping up with key strokes. As a counterexample I point out Visual Studio Code. It's UI is not as snappy as native GUI frameworks, but we have a top notch user experience that's consistent across operating systems and desktop environments. That's a win, isn't it? How many projects can make that claim?
Is it a win? Why? Consistency across platforms is a branding, business goal, not an engineering one. Consistency itself doesn't specify a direction, it just makes it more familiar, and easier to adopt without effort. It's easier to sit all day, and never exercise.
It's what everybody does, or it's what everybody uses, has never translated into it being good.
Notably; the engineers I respect the most, and the ones making things that I enjoy using, none of them use vscode. I'm sure most will read this as an attack against their editor of choice, SHUN THE NON BELIEVER! But hopefully enough will realize that it's not actually an attack on them nor their editor, but instead I'm advocating for what is the best possible option, and not the easiest to use. Could they use vscode? Obviously yes, they could. They don't because the more experience you have, the easier it is to see that bloat get in the way.
> Not OP, but a surprising number of senior(+) engineers at my company use default vim or neovim (no plugins or customizations)
That's fine. They could very well be using the tool they always used. Support for vi bindings is not the best everywhere, and vim works also through terminal connections, which is great if you need to ssh somewhere to edit a few files.
If you have to work with anything related to TypeScript or even JavaScript, you need to think long and hard to figure out what you're doing if your first option isn't vscode.
There's the engineering maxim, which I completely, and unequivocally support; that perfection isn't achieved when there's nothing left to add, but only when there's nothing left to take away.
But that's not enough to explain why it's the preferred editor for elite tier eng.
The thing it offers, in contrast to everything else, is simplicity. Everyone loves to pretend that vi is so difficult o that it is impossible to quit. But if you can forgive it's steep learning curve, it does provide an accelerated experience. And then, critically, it's already out of your way.
All experts advocate the idea behind the quote, "if you give me 6 hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend the first 4 sharpening my axe" Learning the keys of vim is that same sharpening.
I used to use sublime text, my primary reason was because it was fast. That means it got out of my way.
Today, I use neovim. And I've never bothered to set up tab complete, nor anything else like it. It does take me, about 2 extra seconds, per meaningful code block, to type the extra characters needed. But in trade for those tens or milliseconds. I'm granted the intuition for the name of the exact stdlib function I want to call. It lives in not just my head, but I also have developed the habit of understanding the context behind the call.
The feature neovim gives to it's users, it the intuition and the confidence to reason about the code they've written.
There's a lot of anxiety going around about the future of software development, related to AI. The people who have invested the mental energy of learning vim aren't worried, because it's exceptionally obvious that LLMs are pathetic when compared to the quality they've learned to emit naturally.
Or, more simply; if you're the type of person who's willing to invest the mental effort to become good at something. Vim is engineered to make you even better. Contrasted with vscode which has been engineered to make it easier to type... but then... all that time spent has only made you good at the things AI can already do.
tldr; vscode improves the typing experience, vim improves the thinking experience. AI isn't coming for the jobs of the thinkers...
Heads up that if you're on macOS, the included version of vim, like bash,
is frickin ancient. If you run into problems with vim being slow, you may want a newer version.
Ok, but something like Zed is almost as snappy as native GUI frameworks AND has a consistent user experience. It doesn't seem like they are making any tradeoffs there.
It is a problem. The engineering tradeoffs have to be done at each level of the stack. And as progressively more layers of the stack make the trade off away from speed the effects compound.
Nothing about a cross-platform UI requires that it not be snappy. Or that Electron is the best option possible.
Did VSCode do a good job with the options available? Maybe, maybe not. But the options is where I think we should focus.
Having to trade off between two bad options means you’ve already lost.
> Perceived performance is one of these tradeoffs.
Perceived performance should never be a tradeoff, only the measured performance impact can be one.
My iPhone SE from 2020 has input delays of up to 2s after the update to iOS 26 and that's just really disappointing. I wouldn't mind if it'd be in the 0,3ms range, even though that would still be terrible from a measured performance POV.
The Visual Studio code user experience is bad - in part because it is an electron app that is not as snappy as native GUI frameworks, but also for a variety of other reasons. I do not use it voluntarily and resent that many coding tools I would like to use deliberately architect themselves as VSCode plugins rather than more general tools applicable to any editor.
I have definitely run into issues with the UI not visually keeping up with keystrokes in VSCode (occasionally), and also other Electron apps (more often - perhaps they haven't had as much attention to optimization as VSCode has). For this reason alone, I dislike the Electron ecosystem and I am extremely interested in projects to develop alternative cross platform renderers.
Ultimately I would like to see Electron become a dead project so I never have to run into some interesting or useful or mandatory piece of software I need to use that was written using Electron because it was the most obvious choice for the developer.
The "development time is more important than performance" motto treats bad performance as the problem with software, when in reality poor performance is a symptom of growing software complexity. I'm sure that each individual coder who has contributed to software bloat believed that their addition was reasonable. I'm sure everyone who has advocated for microservices fully believes they are solving a real-world problem. The issue is that we don't treat complexity as a problem in-and-of-itself.
In physical disciplines, like mechanical engineering, civil engineering, or even industrial design, there is a natural push towards simplicity. Each new revision is slimmer & more unified–more beautiful because it gets closer to being a perfect object that does exactly what it needs to do, and nothing extra. But in software, possibly because it's difficult to see into a computer, we don't have the drive for simplicity. Each new LLVM binary is bigger than the last, each new HTML spec longer, each new JavaScript framework more abstract, each new Windows revision more bloated.
The result is that it's hard to do basic things. It's hard to draw to the screen manually because the graphics standards have grown so complicated & splintered. So you build a web app, but it's hard to do that from scratch because the pure JS DOM APIs aren't designed for app design. So you adopt a framework, which itself is buried under years of cruft and legacy decisions. This is the situation in many areas of computer science–abstractions on top of abstractions and within abstractions, like some complexity fractal from hell. Yes, each layer fixes a problem. But all together, they create a new problem. Some software bloat is OK, but all software bloat is bad.
Security, accessibility, and robustness are great goals, but if we want to build great software, we can't just tack these features on. We need to solve the difficult problem of fitting in these requirements without making the software much more complex. As engineers, we need to build a culture around being disciplined about simplicity. As humans, we need to support engineering efforts that aren't bogged down by corporate politics.
We do see the same in physical engineering too. At some point some products have plateaued, there's no more development. But still you need to sell more, the designers need to get paid and they are used as status symbols and so on.
One example is skirt length. You have fashion and the only thing about it is change. If everybody's wearing short skirts, then longer skirts will need to be launched in fashion magazines and manufactured and sent to shops in order to sell more. The actual products have not functionally changed in centuries.
I don't think that fashion trends are comparable. I think that fashion trends are fine in concept–things get old and we switch things up. It's the way the human superorganism is able to evolve new ideas. Unfortunately, capitalism accelerates these changes to an unreasonable pace, but even in Star Trek communism, people get bored. The cultural energy that birthed one style is no longer present, we always need something new that appeals to the current time.
But clothes still have to look nice. Fashion designers have a motivation to make clothes that serve their purpose elegantly. Inelegance would be adding metal rails to a skirt so that you could extend its length at will. Sure, the new object has a new function, and its designer might feel clever, but it is uglier. But ugly software and beautiful software often look the same. So software trends end up being ugly, because no one involved had an eye for beauty.
> There are still highly demanded optimized programs or parts of such programs which won't disappear any time soon. Here is a small fraction of such software:
> ...
> Such software will always exist, it just moved to some niche or became a lower level "backbone" of other higher level software.
Yes. I’ve been working for years on building a GPU-based scientific visualization library entirely in C, [1] carefully minimizing heap allocations, optimizing tight loops and data structures, shaving off bytes of memory and microseconds of runtime wherever possible. Meanwhile, everyone else seems content with Electron-style bloat weighing hundreds of megabytes, with multi-second lags and 5-FPS interfaces. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just a relic from another era. But comments like this remind me that I’m simply working in a niche where these optimizations still matter.
You're always going to be up against "good enough" and inertia. For plenty of applications, a bloated Electron app really is good enough!
The library you built looks fucking awesome, by the way. However, I think even you acknowledged on the page that Matplotlib may well be good enough for many use cases. If someone knows an existing tool extremely well, any replacement needs to be a major step change to solve a problem that couldn't be solved in existing, inefficient, tools.
i’m not familiar with this space but I do remember using plotly with webgl to create interactive graphs when they had too many data points (financial tick data). I imagine this is quite a step up and the project looks really cool! I hope you continue working on it.
The question is of course always where someone draws the line, and thats part of the problem.
Too many people have the "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" quote internalized to a degree they won't even think about any criticisms or suggestions.
And while they might be right concerning small stuff, this often piles up and in the end, because you choose several times not to optimize, your technology choices and architecture decisions add up to a bloated mess anyway that can't be salvaged.
Like, when you choose a web framework for a desktop app, install size, memory footprint, slower performance etc. might not matter looked at individually, but in the end it all might easily add up and your solution might just suck without much benefit to you. Pragmatism seems to be the hardest to learn for most developers and so many solutions get blown out of proportion instantly.
> Too many people have the "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" quote internalized to a degree they won't even think about any criticisms or suggestions.
Yeah I find it frustrating how many people interpret that quote as "don't bother optimizing your software". Here's the quote in context from the paper it comes from:
> Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
> Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3 %. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.
Knuth isn't saying "don't bother optimizing", he's saying "don't bother optimizing before you profile your code". These are two very different points.
I like Knuth and think he’s a great writer, but this particular paper [1] is… hard to read. Almost as if it is an unedited stream of consciousness rather than something he intended to be published.
Reading the section you are quoting from (as well as the section of the conclusion dealing with efficiency), I think it should be clear that in the context of this paper, “optimization” means performance enhancements that render the program incomprehensible and unmaintainable. This is so far removed from what anyone in the last 30+ years thinks of when they read the word “optimization” that we are probably better off pretending that this paper was never written. And smacking anyone that quotes it.
I actually think it's a lovely paper (and he obviously intended to publish it, and put a lot of effort into compiling and editing it) and illustrates the nature of his writing very well: he's managed to be encyclopedic about all the topics he chose to discuss, while still having it be very personal (the matter at stake is one of programmers' style and preferences after all). This blog post (https://blog.plover.com/prog/Hoare-logic.html) calls it “my single all-time favorite computer science paper” and here's a recent HN thread with at least two others agreeing it's a great paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416265
My boss (and mentor) from 25 years ago told me to think of the problems I was solving with a 3-step path:
1. Get a solution working
2. Make the solution correct
3. Make the solution efficient
Most importantly, he emphasizes that the work must be done in that order. I've taken that everywhere with me.
I think one of the problems is that quite often, due to business pressure to ship, step 3 is simply skipped. Often, software is shipped half-way through step 2 -- software that is at best partially correct.
The pushes the problem down to the user, who might be building a system around the shipped code. This compounds the problem of software bloat, as all the gaps have to be bridged.
I've never interpreted "Premature optimization..." to mean don't think about performance, just that you don't have to actually implement mechanisms to increase performance until you actually have requirements to do so - you should always ask of a design "how could I make this perform better if I had to".
To me, it rather meant: "Ultrahard" optimization is perfectly fine and a good idea, but not before it has become clear that the requirements won't change anymore (because highly optimized code is very often much harder to change to include additional requirements).
Any different interpretation in my opinion leads to slow, overbloated software.
It is forever baffling to me that so many devs don’t seem to appreciate that small performance issues compound, especially when they’re in a hot path, and have dependent calls.
Databases in particular, since that’s my job. “This query runs in 2 msec, it’s fast enough.” OK, but it gets called 10x per flow because the ORM is absurdly stupid; if you cut it down by 500 microseconds, you’d save 5 msec. Or if you’d make the ORM behave, you could save 18 msec, plus the RTT for each query you neglected to account for.
I've found that mentioning bloat is the fastest way to turn a technical conversation hostile.
Do we need a dozen components of half a million lines each maintained by a separate team for the hotdesk reservation page? I'm not sure, but I'm definitely not willing to endure the conversation that would follow from asking.
What I once said to a less experienced developer in a code review is:
> Don't write stupid slow code
The context was that they wrote a double-lookup in a dictionary, and I was encouraging them to get into the habit of only doing a single lookup.
Naively, one could argue that I was proposing a premature optimization; but the point was that we should develop habits where we choose the more efficient route when it adds no cost to our workflow and keeps code just as readable.
Back in the good old days, I used to play Quake 1 multiplayer (QuakeWorld) a lot on Internet servers. You could place an "autoexec.cfg" file in Quake folder, that automatically executed commands after launching the game, including /connect [IP Address]
The time needed from the moment you launched the game (clicked on the .exe) to the moment you entered the server (to the map view) with all assets 100% loaded was about 1 second. Literally! You click the icon on your desktop and BAM! you're already on the server and you can start shooting. But that was written by John Carmack in C :-)
From other examples - I have a "ModRetro Chromatic" at home which is simply an FPGA version of the Nintendo Game Boy. On this device, you don't see the falling "Nintendo" text with the iconic sound known from normal Game Boys. When I insert a cartridge and flip the Power switch, I'm in the game INSTANTLY. There's simply absolute zero delay here. You turn it on and you're in the game, literally just like with that Quake.
For comparison - I also have a Steam Deck, whose boot time is so long that I sometimes finish my business on the toilet before it even starts up. The difference is simply colossal between what I remember from the old days and what we have today. On old Windows 2000, everything seemed lighter than on modern machines. I really miss that.
A system like SteamOS can be made to boot within seconds - but it takes some effort to set it up like that and I don't think anybody there cares enough when most people would just put the Deck to sleep where it wakes up in a single second.
Game carts also have much faster access times than just about anything else contemporary because they're just ROM. If Linux, OpenGL, Vulkan, etc. were in the ROM of your Steam Deck, and your games were on ROM (not flash) carts, that'd boot up instantly too.
Windows 2000 boots up fast on modern hardware. You're looking through rose-colored-ass glasses if you think it booted up that quick on the hardware available at the time of release. Windows NT was a pig in its day, but at least it was a clean pig, free of spyware and other unnecessary crapware (unless you were like a client site I visited, and just let Bonzi Buddy, Comet Cursor, and such run rampant across your sensitive corporate workstations).
TFA lists maintainability as a benefit of bloat ("modularity, extensibility, code patterns make it easier to maintain"). Completely ignores how bloat harms maintainability by making code unknowable.
Stack enough layers - framework on library on abstraction on dependency - and nobody understands what the system does anymore. Can't hold it in your head. Debugging becomes archaeology through 17 layers of indirection. Features work. Nobody knows why. Nobody dares touch them.
TFA touches this when discussing complexity ("people don't understand how the entire system works"). But treats it as a separate issue. It's not. Bloat creates unknowable systems. Unknowable systems are unmaintainable by definition.
The "developer time is more valuable than CPU cycles" argument falls apart here. You're not saving time. You're moving the cost. The hours you "saved" pulling in that framework? You pay them back with interest every time someone debugs a problem spanning six layers of abstraction they don't understand
A well-optimized program is often a consequence of a deep understanding of the problem domain, good scoping, and mindfulness.
It often feels to me like we’ve gone far down the framework road, and frameworks create leaky abstractions. I think frameworks are often understood as saving time, simplifying, and offloading complexity. But they come with a commitment to align your program to the framework’s abstractions. That is a complicated commitment to make, with deep implications, that is hard to unwind.
Many frameworks can be made to solve any problem, which makes things worse. It invites the “when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” mentality. The quickest route to a solution is no longer the straight path, but to make the appropriate incantations to direct the framework toward that solution, which necessarily becomes more abstract, more complex, and less efficient.
The main point of the framework is to keep developers interchangeable, and therefore suppress wages. All mature industries have things like this: practices that aren't "optimal" (in a very narrow sense), but being standardized means that through competition and economies of scale they are still cheaper than the alternative, better-in-theory solution.
> Stack enough layers - framework on library on abstraction on dependency - and nobody understands what the system does anymore.
This is specious reasoning, as "optimized" implementations typically resort to performance hacks that make code completely unreadable.
> TFA touches this when discussing complexity ("people don't understand how the entire system works"). But treats it as a separate issue. It's not. Bloat creates unknowable systems.
I think you're confusing things. Bloat and lack of a clear software architecture are not the same thing. Your run-of-the-mill app developed around a low-level GUI framework like win32 API tends to be far more convoluted and worse to maintain than equivalent apps built around high-level frameworks, including electron apps. If you develop an app into a big ball of mud, you will have a bad time figuring it out regardless of what framework you're using (or not using)
I'm not advocating for unreadable optimization hacks. I'm working within TFA's own framework.
TFA argues that certain bloat (frameworks, layers, abstractions) is justified because it improves maintainability through "modularity, extensibility, code patterns."
I'm saying: those same layers create a different maintainability problem that TFA ignores. When you stack framework on library on abstraction, you create systems nobody can hold in their head. That's a real cost.
You can have clean architecture and still hit this problem. A well-designed 17-layer system is still 17 layers of indirection between "user clicks button" and "database updates.
> This is specious reasoning, as "optimized" implementations typically resort to performance hacks that make code completely unreadable.
That really depends on context, and you're generalizing based on assumptions that don't hold true:
Replacing bloated ORM code with hand-written SQL can be significantly more readable if it boils down to a simple query that returns rows that neatly map to objects. It could also boil down to a very complicated, hard to follow query that requires gymnastics to populate an object graph.
The same can be said for optimizing CPU usage. It might be a case of removing unneeded complexity, or it could be a case of microoptimizations that require unrolling loops and copy & paste code.
---
I should point out that I've lived the ORM issue: I removed an ORM from a product and it became industry-leading for performance, and the code was so clean that newcomers would compliment me on how easy it was to understand data access. In contrast, the current product that I work on is a clear example of when an ORM is justified.
I've also lived the CPU usage issue: I had to refactor code that was putting numeric timestamps into strings, and then had complicated code that would parse the strings to perform math on the timestamps. The refactor involved replacing the strings with a defined type. Not only was it faster, the code was easier to follow because the timestamps were well encapsulated.
I mean there are different kinds of bloats. Some is justifiable, some is not and some is just a symptom of other problems (the last 2 are not mutually exclusive), like mismanagement, incompetence (from management, developers, team leads, etc). This is somewhat similar to cholesterol, there are different types of cholesterol, some might be really bad, some might be harmless, etc.
Bloat (you mean here code duplication?) can be both cause or a symptom of some maintainability problem. It's like a vicious cycle. A spaghetti code mess (not the same thing as bloat) will be prone to future bloat because developers don't know what they are doing. I mean in the bad sense. You can still be not familiar with the entire system but if the code is well organized, is reusable, modular, testable, you can still work relatively comfortably with such code and have little worries of introducing horrible regressions (in a case of a spaghetti code). You can also do refactors much easier. Meanwhile, a badly managed spaghetti code is much less testable, reusable, when developers work with such code, they often don't want to reuse an existing code, because the existing code is already fragile and not reusable. For each feature they prefer to create or duplicate a new function.
This is a vicious cycle, the code is starting to rot, becoming more and more unmaintainable, duplicated, fragile, and, very likely, inefficient. This is what I meant.
Tangent, but software bloat always leaves me wondering what hardware/software could be if we had different engineering goals.
If we worked hard to keep OS requirements to a minimum- could we be looking at unimaginably improved battery life? Hyper reliable technology that lasts many years? Significantly more affordable hardware?
We know that software bloat wastes RAM and CPU, but we can't know what alternatives we could have if he hadn't spent our metaphorical budget on bloat already.
"If we worked hard to keep OS requirements to a minimum- could we be looking at unimaginably improved battery life? Hyper reliable technology that lasts many years? Significantly more affordable hardware?"
Volunteer-supported UNIX-like OS, e.g., NetBSD, represents the closest to this ideal for me
I am able to use an "old" operating system with new hardware. No forced "upgrades" or remotely-installed "updates". I decide when I want to upgrade software. No new software is pre-installed
This allows me to observe and enjoy the speed gains from upgrading hardware in a way I cannot with a corporate operating system. The later will usurp new hardware resources in large part for its own commercial purposes. It has business goals that may conflict with the non-commercial interests of the computer owner
It would be nice if software did not always grow in size. It happens to even the simplest of programs. Look at the growth of NetBSD's init over time for example
Why not shrink programs instead of growing them
Programmers who remove code may be the "heros", as McIlroy once suggested ("The hero is the negative coder")
Screens and radios do a lot to limit battery life on most modern devices even if the energy use running the OS and user software was free.
If with a reasonable battery standby mode can only last a few weeks and active use is at best a few days then you might as well add a fairly beefy CPU and with a beefy CPU OS optimizations only go so far. This is why eInk devices can end up with such a noticeably longer lifespan, they now have a reason to put in a weak CPU and do some optimization because the possibility of a long lifespan is a huge potential selling point.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
One thing that bothers me about extreme bloat is that I do not want every app to push against the limit of what my computer can handle. It's fine if some game or compiler or such complex software do that every now and then. A common pro-bloat argument is that software should make use of all the hardware instead of leaving it idle, and that makes sense in some contexts. But 99% of the time I would prefer smaller things that I could have lots of and never have to worry about disk or RAM use.
I hate that argument too. The computer is there to serve ME, not to serve the software it runs. Each application should be using as little of the hardware as possible, to make it possible for ME to make use of all the software.
Bloat mostly reflects Conway's law, with the outcome of it being that you're building towards the people you're talking to.
If you build towards everyone, you end up with a large standard like Unicode or IEEE 754. You don't need everything those standards have for your own messages or computations, sometimes you find them counter to your goal in fact, and they end up wasting transistors, but they are convenient enough to be useful defaults, convenient enough to store data that is going to be reused for something else later, and therefore they are ubiquitous in modern computing machines.
And when you have the specific computation in mind - an application like plotting pixels or ballistic trajectories - you can optimize the heck out of it and use exactly the format and features needed and get tight code and tight hardware.
But when you're in the "muddled middle" of trying to model information and maybe it uses some standard stuff but your system is doing something else with it and the business requirements are changing and the standards are changing too and you want it to scale, then you end up with bloat. Trying to be flexible and break up the system into modular bits doesn't really stave this off so much as it creates a Whack-a-Mole of displaced complexity. Trying to use the latest tools and languages and frameworks doesn't solve this either, except where they drag you into a standard that can successfully accommodate the problem. Many languages find their industry adoption case when a "really good library" comes out for it, and that's a kind of informal standardizing.
When you have a bloat problem, try to make a gigantic table of possibilities and accept that it's gonna take a while to fill it in. Sometimes along the way you can discover what you don't need and make it smaller, but it's a code/docs maturity thing. You don't know without the experience.
> Layers & frameworks. Modern software tends to be more complicated. Most of the time people don't write software from scratch, they usually use some library or framework.
Some. But when some reaches the value of more than 80 (i did today an ldd in /usr/bin and i puked), something must be really, really wrong (hello KDE).
The performance of a web service is largely dependant on how many calls and how quickly it can make calls to external services. If a given system is making 2 DB calls when it could instead make one, then that should be the initial focus for optimisation.
Indeed, if a language and framework has slow code execution, but facilitates efficient querying, then it can still perform relatively well.
It's not bloat if it allows users to read text in an app! Or read one that's not blurry! Or one that doesn't "burn his eyes"
> Robustness & error handling / reporting.
Same thing, are you talking about a washing machine sending gigabytes of data per day for no improvement whatsoever "in robustness"? Or are you taking about some virtualized development environment with perfect time travel/reproduction, where whatever hardware "bloat" is needed wouldn't even affect the user? What is the actual difference between error handling in the past besides easy sending of your crash dumps?
> Engineering trade-offs. We accept a larger baseline to ship faster, safer code across many devices.
But we do not do that! The code is too often slower precisely because people have a ready list of empty statements like this
> Hardware grew ~three orders of magnitude. Developer time is often more valuable than RAM or CPU cycles
What about the value of time/resources of your users ? Why ignore reality outside of this simplistic dichotomy.
Or will the devs not even see the suffering because the "robust error handling and reporting" is nothing of the sort, it mostly /dev/nulls a lot of user experience?
Sorry. My bad. Looks like the size is also very sensitive to the method of compression and software as well (regardless of being PNG or WEBP). I found another PNG picture here https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/where-do-all-the-bytes-com... it is 64KiB. When you stretch the image, it's also likely to add kilobytes. I guess I need to update the image.
But anyways, I think it's still very demonstrative when an entire game size is smaller than its picture. Also consider that even your tiny PNG example (3.37KiB) still cannot fit into the the RAM / VRAM of a NES console which shows the contrast between these eras in regards of amounts of memory.
That image has a similar problem to yours. It has been scaled up using some kind of interpolation which introduces a load of extra colours to smooth the edges. This is not a great fit for PNG, which is why it is 64KB.
The article claims that it is only 5.9KB. I guess it was that small originally and it's been mangled by the publishing process.
I think a more realistic comparison is a BMP image (16 or 256 color) because the game didn't compress the image the way PNG or WebP does. When I converted that tiny ~3KiB image to 16 color BMP the size was 28.1KiB, for 256 color it was 57KiB. But some colors were lost.
Anyways I don't think we can have 100% apple to apple comparison, because the game used a different compression and rendering technique. Also consider the actual amount of RAM / VRAM the images are occupying. In RAM / VRAM they are probably in a decompressed form which is much more memory.
I agree that there's no perfect comparison. I just think that whatever image format you use for the comparison, you should be storing an original picture, not one that has been stretched or otherwise modified.
FWIW, if you convert the 3KB image to 16 colours in GIMP (Image | Mode | Indexed... and choose "Generate Optimum Palette") it looks exactly the same. I'm pretty sure there are only 16 colours in the image. The resulting PNG is 1,991 bytes.
I work in enterprise, B2C software, lots of single page apps / self service portals, that kind of thing. I don't think our software is bloated per se; sure it could be faster, but for example when it comes to mobile apps, it's a tradeoff between having the best and fastest apps, being able to hire people, development speed, and non-functional requirements.
As far as internal services go, I agree, being able to easily add stuff is the main priority.
For customer facing stuff, I think it's worth looking into frameworks that do backend templating and then doing light DOM manipulation to add dynamism on the client side. Frameworks like Phoenix make this very ergonomic.
95% of portals could be done with 2000s tech (since they're basically CRUD apps) - the question is what it is worth to make them that way.
And the answer is almost always "nothing" because "good enough" is fine.
People like to shit on development tools like Electron, but the reality is that if the app is shitty on Electron, it'd probably be just as shitty on native code, because it is possible to write good Electron apps.
When I think of good Electron apps, the first name that pops to my mind is Visual Studio Code. They really did a lot of work to make the editor responsive and capable of sophisticated things without blowing your RAM/disk budget.
But it's still bloated compared to the editor I use, Emacs.
And it's still bloated compared to a Java-based IDE of equivalent functionality. (Eclipse and IntelliJ can do much more OOTB than VS Code can.)
I guess that's that acceptable software bloat the site probably is talking about. :) (I have not clicked. I first read comments to find out if it's worth clicking.)
Lol. It's the behavior I see when there's a malicious chrome plugin installed. A link on a page loads a spam site randomly in a new tab, but the links works normal after that. Im pretty sure it's none of my plugins I guess.
That said, all of engineering is a tradeoff, and tradeoffs mean accepting some amount of bad in exchange for some amount of good.
In these times, though, companies seem to be very willing to accept bloat for marginal or nonexistent returns, and this is one of the reasons why, in my opinion, so much of the software being released these days is poor.
I had to write Android app recently. I don't like bloat. So I disabled all libraries. Well, I did it, but I was jumping over many hoops. Android Development presumes that you're using appcompat libraries and some others. In the end my APK was 30 KB and worked on every smartphone I was interested (from Android 8 to Android 16). Android Studio Hello World APK is about 2 MB, if I remember correctly. This is truly madness.
The reason being that Android used to advocate how great it was versus J2ME fragmentation, a marketing move that only impressed those without experience, turns out that a great deal of appcompat code is actually to deal with Android fragmentation across OEMs and devices.
I used to release an Android app 10ish years ago (before I was banned by Google from releasing Android apps) and this was the case back then. Every time I opened Eclipse it would automatically add the 6MB "support library" to my otherwise 50kB app. There was no way to turn this off, but if you removed it, it would stay removed for that session. Usually I only noticed I'd forgotten when I built the final .apk and went to upload it to the App Store.
In the article, many tradeoffs are mentioned. The thing is, many of these tradeoffs are necessary to support the bloat, that is, bloat needs bloat.
- Layers & frameworks: We always had some layers and frameworks, the big one being the operating system. The problem is that now, instead of having these layers shared between applications (shared libraries, OS calls, etc...), every app wants to do their own thing and they all ship their own framework. For the calculator example, with the fonts, common controls, rendering code, etc... the global footprint was probably several MBs even in the early days, but the vast majority of it was shared with other applications and the OS shell itself, resulting in only a few extra kB for the calculator.
- Security & isolation: That's mostly the job of the OS and even the hardware. But the one reason why we need security so much is that the more bloated your code is, the more room there is for vulnerabilities. We don't need to isolate components that don't exist in the first place.
- Robustness & error handling / reporting: The less there is, the less can go wrong, so more robust and less errors to handle.
- Globalization & accessibility: That's true that it adds some bloat, however, that's something that the OS should take care of. If everyone uses the same shared GUI toolkit, only it has to deal with these issues. Note that many of these problems were addressed in the Windows 9x era.
- Containers & virtualization: Containerization is a solution to dependency hell and non-portable code, you carry your entire environment with you so you don't have to adjust to a new environment. The more dependencies you have, i.e. the most bloat, the more you need it. And going back to security and accessibility, since you are now shipping your environnement, you don't benefit from system-wide updates that address these issues.
- Engineering trade-offs: that is computers are cheap, developers are expensive. We are effectively trading time to hand-craft lightweight optimized software to keeping up with the bloat.
I get the author's point, but I believe that most of it is self-inflicted. I remember the early days of Android. I had a Nexus One, 512MB RAM / 1GHz single core CPU / 512MB Flash + 4GB MicroSD and it could do most of what I am doing now with a phone that is >10x more powerful in every aspect. And that's with internationalization, process isolation, the JVM, etc... Not only that but Google was much smaller back then, so much for lowering development costs.
I'm curious, can you vibe code assembly? Perhaps the AI's havent been trained on much of it.. But in theory you could get amazing performance without all the work? .. The only downside is you would have zero idea how the code works and it would be entirely unmaintainable.
unfortunately the article is very offensive to anyone living outside of major urban centers, it presumes that along with our daily cake, that unlimited data and means to aquire it are only to be mentioned as trivialitys, if at all.
rural devitalization is accelerating, with another article here describing how unreliable electrical power is in Calfornias country side
I wont get into the details, but please imagine all the fun to be had attempting to turn off a win11 laptop, with hyper low speed and bandwidth internet, in order to try and save some battery in case the power does not come back on, which is the reality on most of our planets surface.
Bloat is OK when the alternative is worse. But have you really done the analyzes on how bad and how bigger the bloat is going to get? But it's still justified if the alternative is worse.
Sometimes I feel the biggest contribution React made to the world isn't it speeded up frontend dev or something. It's showing how much discussion about performance is pure paranoid.
FOSS code can absolutely be stolen, if it's usage is in violation of the contract that it is shared under. In the case of the GPL, that means granting your users the same freedoms you were granted, which last I checked "Open"AI absolutely is not doing.
I want to benchmark how much battery life Electron apps drain from my computer compared to the equivalent native apps. Then, we can talk about if bloat is OK.
If I could make one law related to software, it would be to ban React and React-like frameworks (includes Vue and Svelte I believe): if you have to put more than one line of HTML in your JavaScript, if you have VDOM, if you have a build step - I want this to be illegal. It is entirely possible to write a js-framework that attaches itself to DOM from the top, without any kind of expensive hydration steps or VDOM or templating (I've built one). React is a horrible complex monster that wastes developers time, heats up users' CPUs and generally feels super slow and laggy. 99% percent of websites would work a lot better with SSR and a few lines of JavaScript here and there and there is zero reason to bring anything like React to the table. React is the most tasteless thing ever invented in software.
> React and React-like frameworks (includes Vue and Svelte I believe)
Putting React with those two is a wild take.
> 99% percent of websites would work a lot better with SSR and a few lines of JavaScript here and there and there is zero reason to bring anything like React to the table.
Probably but as soon as you have a modicum of logic in your page the primitives of the web are a pain to use.
Also, I must be able to build stuff in the 1% space. I actually did it before: I built an app that's entirely client-side, with Vue, and "serverless" in the sense that it's distributed in the form of one single HTML file. Although we changed that in the last few months to host it on a proper server.
The level of psychological trauma that some back-end devs seem to endure is hilarious though. Like I get it, software sucks and it's sad but no need to be dramatic about it.
And btw, re forbidding stuff: no library, no process, no method can ever substitute to actually knowing what you're doing.
You can do very complex stuff without any need for React like approach. I literally said I've written a very sophisticated framework that was exceptionally snappy - that's what should be used for that 1% (not my framework, but the approach). Even better, I could introduce it very gradually and strategically on different SSR pages and then (if I wanted to) I could turn the whole app into an SPA - all without needing to "render" anything with JavaScript, VDOM or other such nonsense.
Is this framework public? I think the same way as you and developed my own framework with/out the things you mentioned and would like to compare my approach with yours. Biggest difference is that I use lit-html for templating, which is quite efficient.
> It is entirely possible to write a js-framework that attaches itself to DOM from the top, without any kind of expensive hydration steps or VDOM or templating (I've built one)
Can you elaborate more on how this works? Do you mean JS loading server generated HTML into the DOM?
Server renders the page. Suppose you have a element there which reads like <div data-component="HenloComponent">...</div>. Then the .js framework which was loaded on that page queries the DOM in search of any elements with data-component attribute and creates instances of HenloComponent (which is a class written by you, the developer, user of the framework). It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the essence of it.
Note that with this approach you don't need to "render" anything, browser already done it for you. You merely attaching functionality to DOM elements in the form of Component instances.
I entirely agree. It is what I do when I have to - although I mostly do simple JS as I am a backend developer really, and if I do any front end its "HTML plus a bit of JS" and I just write JS loading stuff into divs by ID.
When i have worked with front end developers doing stuff in react it has been a horrible experience. In the very worst case they used next.js to write a second backend that sat between my existing Django backend (which had been done earlier) and the front end. Great for latency! It was an extreme example but it really soured my attitude to complex front ends. The project died.
> In the very worst case they used next.js to write a second backend that sat between my existing Django backend (which had been done earlier) and the front end.
That's hilarious.
Casey Muratori truly is right when he says to "non-pessimize" software (= make it do what it should do and not more), before optimizing it.
Oh no, they do that? I thought Next.js is a fully functional backend itself, like Django. But I'm shocked to learn that it's just a middleman-backend to render templates that are already served from another backend.
Next.js is a a fully functional backend. Its not Next's fault - I dislike it for other reasons, but this was not a Next problem.
The problem was that the front end developers involved decided to use Next.js to replace the front end of a mostly complete Django site. I think it was very much a case of someone just wanting to use what they knew regardless of whether it was a good fit - the "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" effect.
It is Vercel's "fault" because it sold Next.JS as a BFF (Backend-for-frontend), a concept that didn't exist but helped them sell lots of hosting for React, something absolutely unexpected to every old school React developer.
I did a search and a lot of people are promoting the concept. Maybe it makes sense if you have a strong reason to use micro services, but for the vast majority of systems it seems crazy!
Why not ditch HTML itself? People are already downloading binary blobs on a daily basis anyway, just download some binary once, execute them in some isolated environment. So you only have to transmit data.
I don't see a problem with HTML. It's easy to learn, easy to use and a very nice format for web. CSS is also great. JavaScript is pretty great too. My point is that modern web is horrible because people with no taste and no understanding of the underlying technologies turned it into a horrible shitshow by inventing frameworks that turn the web upside down and making a bloat out of it. I don't hate many things in life, but this one - with passion, because every time I visit a website, I can just feel it's made with React because of how slow and laggy it is.
Do not know to what extent you are serious, but I think the idea is that content should be HTML and apps should be just JS.
We could go further and have a language written to run in a sandbox VM especially for that with a GUI library designed for the task instead of being derived from a document format.
Ehrm, have you seen how fancy UI stuff is being implemented in so-called "native apps" these days? Anything more complicated than a button or label or other elements familiar since 1993 gets shoved into a webview and rendered with HTML and CSS.
No software bloat isn't ok. Tech debt can be ok, and software bloat can be the consequence of tech debt taken on with eyes open. But to say that (some) software bloat without considerations is ok is how we have the fastest machines imaginable and still end up with UI that can't keep up visually with keystrokes.
Quoting Knuth without the entire context is also contributing to bloat.
> Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered.
> We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.
> But to say that (some) software bloat without considerations is ok is how we have the fastest machines imaginable and still end up with UI that can't keep up visually with keystrokes.
Is this actually a problem, though? The blog features a section on tradeoffs, and dedicates an entire section to engineering tradeoffs. Perceived performance is one of these tradeoffs.
You complain about UI not keeping up with key strokes. As a counterexample I point out Visual Studio Code. It's UI is not as snappy as native GUI frameworks, but we have a top notch user experience that's consistent across operating systems and desktop environments. That's a win, isn't it? How many projects can make that claim?
The blog post also has a section on how a significant part of the bloat is bad.
> You complain about UI not keeping up with key strokes. As a counterexample I point out Visual Studio Code. It's UI is not as snappy as native GUI frameworks, but we have a top notch user experience that's consistent across operating systems and desktop environments. That's a win, isn't it? How many projects can make that claim?
Is it a win? Why? Consistency across platforms is a branding, business goal, not an engineering one. Consistency itself doesn't specify a direction, it just makes it more familiar, and easier to adopt without effort. It's easier to sit all day, and never exercise.
It's what everybody does, or it's what everybody uses, has never translated into it being good.
Notably; the engineers I respect the most, and the ones making things that I enjoy using, none of them use vscode. I'm sure most will read this as an attack against their editor of choice, SHUN THE NON BELIEVER! But hopefully enough will realize that it's not actually an attack on them nor their editor, but instead I'm advocating for what is the best possible option, and not the easiest to use. Could they use vscode? Obviously yes, they could. They don't because the more experience you have, the easier it is to see that bloat get in the way.
> Notably; the engineers I respect the most, and the ones making things that I enjoy using, none of them use vscode.
Curious what they use?
Not OP, but a surprising number of senior(+) engineers at my company use default vim or neovim (no plugins or customizations)
> Not OP, but a surprising number of senior(+) engineers at my company use default vim or neovim (no plugins or customizations)
That's fine. They could very well be using the tool they always used. Support for vi bindings is not the best everywhere, and vim works also through terminal connections, which is great if you need to ssh somewhere to edit a few files.
If you have to work with anything related to TypeScript or even JavaScript, you need to think long and hard to figure out what you're doing if your first option isn't vscode.
... why? What does it offer that literally any other IDE does not? Genuinely asking.
Nothing, but that's the point.
There's the engineering maxim, which I completely, and unequivocally support; that perfection isn't achieved when there's nothing left to add, but only when there's nothing left to take away.
But that's not enough to explain why it's the preferred editor for elite tier eng.
The thing it offers, in contrast to everything else, is simplicity. Everyone loves to pretend that vi is so difficult o that it is impossible to quit. But if you can forgive it's steep learning curve, it does provide an accelerated experience. And then, critically, it's already out of your way.
All experts advocate the idea behind the quote, "if you give me 6 hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend the first 4 sharpening my axe" Learning the keys of vim is that same sharpening.
I used to use sublime text, my primary reason was because it was fast. That means it got out of my way.
Today, I use neovim. And I've never bothered to set up tab complete, nor anything else like it. It does take me, about 2 extra seconds, per meaningful code block, to type the extra characters needed. But in trade for those tens or milliseconds. I'm granted the intuition for the name of the exact stdlib function I want to call. It lives in not just my head, but I also have developed the habit of understanding the context behind the call.
The feature neovim gives to it's users, it the intuition and the confidence to reason about the code they've written.
There's a lot of anxiety going around about the future of software development, related to AI. The people who have invested the mental energy of learning vim aren't worried, because it's exceptionally obvious that LLMs are pathetic when compared to the quality they've learned to emit naturally.
Or, more simply; if you're the type of person who's willing to invest the mental effort to become good at something. Vim is engineered to make you even better. Contrasted with vscode which has been engineered to make it easier to type... but then... all that time spent has only made you good at the things AI can already do.
tldr; vscode improves the typing experience, vim improves the thinking experience. AI isn't coming for the jobs of the thinkers...
Heads up that if you're on macOS, the included version of vim, like bash, is frickin ancient. If you run into problems with vim being slow, you may want a newer version.
Homebrew's got you covered though!
Ok, but something like Zed is almost as snappy as native GUI frameworks AND has a consistent user experience. It doesn't seem like they are making any tradeoffs there.
It is a problem. The engineering tradeoffs have to be done at each level of the stack. And as progressively more layers of the stack make the trade off away from speed the effects compound.
Nothing about a cross-platform UI requires that it not be snappy. Or that Electron is the best option possible.
Did VSCode do a good job with the options available? Maybe, maybe not. But the options is where I think we should focus.
Having to trade off between two bad options means you’ve already lost.
> Perceived performance is one of these tradeoffs.
Perceived performance should never be a tradeoff, only the measured performance impact can be one.
My iPhone SE from 2020 has input delays of up to 2s after the update to iOS 26 and that's just really disappointing. I wouldn't mind if it'd be in the 0,3ms range, even though that would still be terrible from a measured performance POV.
The Visual Studio code user experience is bad - in part because it is an electron app that is not as snappy as native GUI frameworks, but also for a variety of other reasons. I do not use it voluntarily and resent that many coding tools I would like to use deliberately architect themselves as VSCode plugins rather than more general tools applicable to any editor.
I have definitely run into issues with the UI not visually keeping up with keystrokes in VSCode (occasionally), and also other Electron apps (more often - perhaps they haven't had as much attention to optimization as VSCode has). For this reason alone, I dislike the Electron ecosystem and I am extremely interested in projects to develop alternative cross platform renderers.
Ultimately I would like to see Electron become a dead project so I never have to run into some interesting or useful or mandatory piece of software I need to use that was written using Electron because it was the most obvious choice for the developer.
The "development time is more important than performance" motto treats bad performance as the problem with software, when in reality poor performance is a symptom of growing software complexity. I'm sure that each individual coder who has contributed to software bloat believed that their addition was reasonable. I'm sure everyone who has advocated for microservices fully believes they are solving a real-world problem. The issue is that we don't treat complexity as a problem in-and-of-itself.
In physical disciplines, like mechanical engineering, civil engineering, or even industrial design, there is a natural push towards simplicity. Each new revision is slimmer & more unified–more beautiful because it gets closer to being a perfect object that does exactly what it needs to do, and nothing extra. But in software, possibly because it's difficult to see into a computer, we don't have the drive for simplicity. Each new LLVM binary is bigger than the last, each new HTML spec longer, each new JavaScript framework more abstract, each new Windows revision more bloated.
The result is that it's hard to do basic things. It's hard to draw to the screen manually because the graphics standards have grown so complicated & splintered. So you build a web app, but it's hard to do that from scratch because the pure JS DOM APIs aren't designed for app design. So you adopt a framework, which itself is buried under years of cruft and legacy decisions. This is the situation in many areas of computer science–abstractions on top of abstractions and within abstractions, like some complexity fractal from hell. Yes, each layer fixes a problem. But all together, they create a new problem. Some software bloat is OK, but all software bloat is bad.
Security, accessibility, and robustness are great goals, but if we want to build great software, we can't just tack these features on. We need to solve the difficult problem of fitting in these requirements without making the software much more complex. As engineers, we need to build a culture around being disciplined about simplicity. As humans, we need to support engineering efforts that aren't bogged down by corporate politics.
We do see the same in physical engineering too. At some point some products have plateaued, there's no more development. But still you need to sell more, the designers need to get paid and they are used as status symbols and so on.
One example is skirt length. You have fashion and the only thing about it is change. If everybody's wearing short skirts, then longer skirts will need to be launched in fashion magazines and manufactured and sent to shops in order to sell more. The actual products have not functionally changed in centuries.
Or people just start ignoring the trends and only replace their clothes when they wear out.
I don't think that fashion trends are comparable. I think that fashion trends are fine in concept–things get old and we switch things up. It's the way the human superorganism is able to evolve new ideas. Unfortunately, capitalism accelerates these changes to an unreasonable pace, but even in Star Trek communism, people get bored. The cultural energy that birthed one style is no longer present, we always need something new that appeals to the current time.
But clothes still have to look nice. Fashion designers have a motivation to make clothes that serve their purpose elegantly. Inelegance would be adding metal rails to a skirt so that you could extend its length at will. Sure, the new object has a new function, and its designer might feel clever, but it is uglier. But ugly software and beautiful software often look the same. So software trends end up being ugly, because no one involved had an eye for beauty.
> There are still highly demanded optimized programs or parts of such programs which won't disappear any time soon. Here is a small fraction of such software: > ... > Such software will always exist, it just moved to some niche or became a lower level "backbone" of other higher level software.
Yes. I’ve been working for years on building a GPU-based scientific visualization library entirely in C, [1] carefully minimizing heap allocations, optimizing tight loops and data structures, shaving off bytes of memory and microseconds of runtime wherever possible. Meanwhile, everyone else seems content with Electron-style bloat weighing hundreds of megabytes, with multi-second lags and 5-FPS interfaces. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just a relic from another era. But comments like this remind me that I’m simply working in a niche where these optimizations still matter.
[1] https://datoviz.org/
You're always going to be up against "good enough" and inertia. For plenty of applications, a bloated Electron app really is good enough!
The library you built looks fucking awesome, by the way. However, I think even you acknowledged on the page that Matplotlib may well be good enough for many use cases. If someone knows an existing tool extremely well, any replacement needs to be a major step change to solve a problem that couldn't be solved in existing, inefficient, tools.
Thanks. The use cases for my library are pretty clear: anytime Matplotlib is way too slow or just crashes under the weight of too much data (and 3D).
Please keep doing what you’re doing; I appreciate the effort and mentality.
Thanks!
i’m not familiar with this space but I do remember using plotly with webgl to create interactive graphs when they had too many data points (financial tick data). I imagine this is quite a step up and the project looks really cool! I hope you continue working on it.
The question is of course always where someone draws the line, and thats part of the problem.
Too many people have the "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" quote internalized to a degree they won't even think about any criticisms or suggestions.
And while they might be right concerning small stuff, this often piles up and in the end, because you choose several times not to optimize, your technology choices and architecture decisions add up to a bloated mess anyway that can't be salvaged.
Like, when you choose a web framework for a desktop app, install size, memory footprint, slower performance etc. might not matter looked at individually, but in the end it all might easily add up and your solution might just suck without much benefit to you. Pragmatism seems to be the hardest to learn for most developers and so many solutions get blown out of proportion instantly.
> Too many people have the "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" quote internalized to a degree they won't even think about any criticisms or suggestions.
Yeah I find it frustrating how many people interpret that quote as "don't bother optimizing your software". Here's the quote in context from the paper it comes from:
> Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
> Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3 %. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.
Knuth isn't saying "don't bother optimizing", he's saying "don't bother optimizing before you profile your code". These are two very different points.
I like Knuth and think he’s a great writer, but this particular paper [1] is… hard to read. Almost as if it is an unedited stream of consciousness rather than something he intended to be published.
Reading the section you are quoting from (as well as the section of the conclusion dealing with efficiency), I think it should be clear that in the context of this paper, “optimization” means performance enhancements that render the program incomprehensible and unmaintainable. This is so far removed from what anyone in the last 30+ years thinks of when they read the word “optimization” that we are probably better off pretending that this paper was never written. And smacking anyone that quotes it.
[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/356635.356640
I actually think it's a lovely paper (and he obviously intended to publish it, and put a lot of effort into compiling and editing it) and illustrates the nature of his writing very well: he's managed to be encyclopedic about all the topics he chose to discuss, while still having it be very personal (the matter at stake is one of programmers' style and preferences after all). This blog post (https://blog.plover.com/prog/Hoare-logic.html) calls it “my single all-time favorite computer science paper” and here's a recent HN thread with at least two others agreeing it's a great paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416265
I've posted a better scan here: https://shreevatsa.net/tmp/2025-06/DEK-P67-Structured.progra...
I'm old.
My boss (and mentor) from 25 years ago told me to think of the problems I was solving with a 3-step path:
1. Get a solution working
2. Make the solution correct
3. Make the solution efficient
Most importantly, he emphasizes that the work must be done in that order. I've taken that everywhere with me.
I think one of the problems is that quite often, due to business pressure to ship, step 3 is simply skipped. Often, software is shipped half-way through step 2 -- software that is at best partially correct.
The pushes the problem down to the user, who might be building a system around the shipped code. This compounds the problem of software bloat, as all the gaps have to be bridged.
> Make It Work
> Make It Right
> Make It Fast
https://wiki.c2.com/?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast
I've never interpreted "Premature optimization..." to mean don't think about performance, just that you don't have to actually implement mechanisms to increase performance until you actually have requirements to do so - you should always ask of a design "how could I make this perform better if I had to".
To me, it rather meant: "Ultrahard" optimization is perfectly fine and a good idea, but not before it has become clear that the requirements won't change anymore (because highly optimized code is very often much harder to change to include additional requirements).
Any different interpretation in my opinion leads to slow, overbloated software.
Yeah - I've heard that described as "It's easier to make working things fast than fast thing work" - or something like that.
It is forever baffling to me that so many devs don’t seem to appreciate that small performance issues compound, especially when they’re in a hot path, and have dependent calls.
Databases in particular, since that’s my job. “This query runs in 2 msec, it’s fast enough.” OK, but it gets called 10x per flow because the ORM is absurdly stupid; if you cut it down by 500 microseconds, you’d save 5 msec. Or if you’d make the ORM behave, you could save 18 msec, plus the RTT for each query you neglected to account for.
I've found that mentioning bloat is the fastest way to turn a technical conversation hostile.
Do we need a dozen components of half a million lines each maintained by a separate team for the hotdesk reservation page? I'm not sure, but I'm definitely not willing to endure the conversation that would follow from asking.
What I once said to a less experienced developer in a code review is:
> Don't write stupid slow code
The context was that they wrote a double-lookup in a dictionary, and I was encouraging them to get into the habit of only doing a single lookup.
Naively, one could argue that I was proposing a premature optimization; but the point was that we should develop habits where we choose the more efficient route when it adds no cost to our workflow and keeps code just as readable.
Back in the good old days, I used to play Quake 1 multiplayer (QuakeWorld) a lot on Internet servers. You could place an "autoexec.cfg" file in Quake folder, that automatically executed commands after launching the game, including /connect [IP Address]
The time needed from the moment you launched the game (clicked on the .exe) to the moment you entered the server (to the map view) with all assets 100% loaded was about 1 second. Literally! You click the icon on your desktop and BAM! you're already on the server and you can start shooting. But that was written by John Carmack in C :-)
From other examples - I have a "ModRetro Chromatic" at home which is simply an FPGA version of the Nintendo Game Boy. On this device, you don't see the falling "Nintendo" text with the iconic sound known from normal Game Boys. When I insert a cartridge and flip the Power switch, I'm in the game INSTANTLY. There's simply absolute zero delay here. You turn it on and you're in the game, literally just like with that Quake.
For comparison - I also have a Steam Deck, whose boot time is so long that I sometimes finish my business on the toilet before it even starts up. The difference is simply colossal between what I remember from the old days and what we have today. On old Windows 2000, everything seemed lighter than on modern machines. I really miss that.
A system like SteamOS can be made to boot within seconds - but it takes some effort to set it up like that and I don't think anybody there cares enough when most people would just put the Deck to sleep where it wakes up in a single second.
Game carts also have much faster access times than just about anything else contemporary because they're just ROM. If Linux, OpenGL, Vulkan, etc. were in the ROM of your Steam Deck, and your games were on ROM (not flash) carts, that'd boot up instantly too.
Windows 2000 boots up fast on modern hardware. You're looking through rose-colored-ass glasses if you think it booted up that quick on the hardware available at the time of release. Windows NT was a pig in its day, but at least it was a clean pig, free of spyware and other unnecessary crapware (unless you were like a client site I visited, and just let Bonzi Buddy, Comet Cursor, and such run rampant across your sensitive corporate workstations).
TFA lists maintainability as a benefit of bloat ("modularity, extensibility, code patterns make it easier to maintain"). Completely ignores how bloat harms maintainability by making code unknowable.
Stack enough layers - framework on library on abstraction on dependency - and nobody understands what the system does anymore. Can't hold it in your head. Debugging becomes archaeology through 17 layers of indirection. Features work. Nobody knows why. Nobody dares touch them.
TFA touches this when discussing complexity ("people don't understand how the entire system works"). But treats it as a separate issue. It's not. Bloat creates unknowable systems. Unknowable systems are unmaintainable by definition.
The "developer time is more valuable than CPU cycles" argument falls apart here. You're not saving time. You're moving the cost. The hours you "saved" pulling in that framework? You pay them back with interest every time someone debugs a problem spanning six layers of abstraction they don't understand
A well-optimized program is often a consequence of a deep understanding of the problem domain, good scoping, and mindfulness.
It often feels to me like we’ve gone far down the framework road, and frameworks create leaky abstractions. I think frameworks are often understood as saving time, simplifying, and offloading complexity. But they come with a commitment to align your program to the framework’s abstractions. That is a complicated commitment to make, with deep implications, that is hard to unwind.
Many frameworks can be made to solve any problem, which makes things worse. It invites the “when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” mentality. The quickest route to a solution is no longer the straight path, but to make the appropriate incantations to direct the framework toward that solution, which necessarily becomes more abstract, more complex, and less efficient.
The main point of the framework is to keep developers interchangeable, and therefore suppress wages. All mature industries have things like this: practices that aren't "optimal" (in a very narrow sense), but being standardized means that through competition and economies of scale they are still cheaper than the alternative, better-in-theory solution.
I completely agree. This is the point I make here: https://hackernoon.com/framework-or-language-get-off-my-lawn...
> Stack enough layers - framework on library on abstraction on dependency - and nobody understands what the system does anymore.
This is specious reasoning, as "optimized" implementations typically resort to performance hacks that make code completely unreadable.
> TFA touches this when discussing complexity ("people don't understand how the entire system works"). But treats it as a separate issue. It's not. Bloat creates unknowable systems.
I think you're confusing things. Bloat and lack of a clear software architecture are not the same thing. Your run-of-the-mill app developed around a low-level GUI framework like win32 API tends to be far more convoluted and worse to maintain than equivalent apps built around high-level frameworks, including electron apps. If you develop an app into a big ball of mud, you will have a bad time figuring it out regardless of what framework you're using (or not using)
I'm not advocating for unreadable optimization hacks. I'm working within TFA's own framework. TFA argues that certain bloat (frameworks, layers, abstractions) is justified because it improves maintainability through "modularity, extensibility, code patterns."
I'm saying: those same layers create a different maintainability problem that TFA ignores. When you stack framework on library on abstraction, you create systems nobody can hold in their head. That's a real cost.
You can have clean architecture and still hit this problem. A well-designed 17-layer system is still 17 layers of indirection between "user clicks button" and "database updates.
> This is specious reasoning, as "optimized" implementations typically resort to performance hacks that make code completely unreadable.
That really depends on context, and you're generalizing based on assumptions that don't hold true:
Replacing bloated ORM code with hand-written SQL can be significantly more readable if it boils down to a simple query that returns rows that neatly map to objects. It could also boil down to a very complicated, hard to follow query that requires gymnastics to populate an object graph.
The same can be said for optimizing CPU usage. It might be a case of removing unneeded complexity, or it could be a case of microoptimizations that require unrolling loops and copy & paste code.
---
I should point out that I've lived the ORM issue: I removed an ORM from a product and it became industry-leading for performance, and the code was so clean that newcomers would compliment me on how easy it was to understand data access. In contrast, the current product that I work on is a clear example of when an ORM is justified.
I've also lived the CPU usage issue: I had to refactor code that was putting numeric timestamps into strings, and then had complicated code that would parse the strings to perform math on the timestamps. The refactor involved replacing the strings with a defined type. Not only was it faster, the code was easier to follow because the timestamps were well encapsulated.
I mean there are different kinds of bloats. Some is justifiable, some is not and some is just a symptom of other problems (the last 2 are not mutually exclusive), like mismanagement, incompetence (from management, developers, team leads, etc). This is somewhat similar to cholesterol, there are different types of cholesterol, some might be really bad, some might be harmless, etc.
Bloat (you mean here code duplication?) can be both cause or a symptom of some maintainability problem. It's like a vicious cycle. A spaghetti code mess (not the same thing as bloat) will be prone to future bloat because developers don't know what they are doing. I mean in the bad sense. You can still be not familiar with the entire system but if the code is well organized, is reusable, modular, testable, you can still work relatively comfortably with such code and have little worries of introducing horrible regressions (in a case of a spaghetti code). You can also do refactors much easier. Meanwhile, a badly managed spaghetti code is much less testable, reusable, when developers work with such code, they often don't want to reuse an existing code, because the existing code is already fragile and not reusable. For each feature they prefer to create or duplicate a new function.
This is a vicious cycle, the code is starting to rot, becoming more and more unmaintainable, duplicated, fragile, and, very likely, inefficient. This is what I meant.
Tangent, but software bloat always leaves me wondering what hardware/software could be if we had different engineering goals.
If we worked hard to keep OS requirements to a minimum- could we be looking at unimaginably improved battery life? Hyper reliable technology that lasts many years? Significantly more affordable hardware?
We know that software bloat wastes RAM and CPU, but we can't know what alternatives we could have if he hadn't spent our metaphorical budget on bloat already.
"If we worked hard to keep OS requirements to a minimum- could we be looking at unimaginably improved battery life? Hyper reliable technology that lasts many years? Significantly more affordable hardware?"
Volunteer-supported UNIX-like OS, e.g., NetBSD, represents the closest to this ideal for me
I am able to use an "old" operating system with new hardware. No forced "upgrades" or remotely-installed "updates". I decide when I want to upgrade software. No new software is pre-installed
This allows me to observe and enjoy the speed gains from upgrading hardware in a way I cannot with a corporate operating system. The later will usurp new hardware resources in large part for its own commercial purposes. It has business goals that may conflict with the non-commercial interests of the computer owner
It would be nice if software did not always grow in size. It happens to even the simplest of programs. Look at the growth of NetBSD's init over time for example
Why not shrink programs instead of growing them
Programmers who remove code may be the "heros", as McIlroy once suggested ("The hero is the negative coder")
Screens and radios do a lot to limit battery life on most modern devices even if the energy use running the OS and user software was free.
If with a reasonable battery standby mode can only last a few weeks and active use is at best a few days then you might as well add a fairly beefy CPU and with a beefy CPU OS optimizations only go so far. This is why eInk devices can end up with such a noticeably longer lifespan, they now have a reason to put in a weak CPU and do some optimization because the possibility of a long lifespan is a huge potential selling point.
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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...
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.
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.
Yeah, somehow it went from don't micro optimize loops to 500MB Electron apps are just fine actually hahaha
The latest MS Teams update on MacOS fetched an installer that asked me for 1.2GB (Yes, G!) of disk space...
I recently found out that Teams was taking up over 5 GB on my laptop. The incompetence of Microsoft developers knows no bounds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Electron apps also run in a browser. They package an entire browser as part of the app.
And consequently, "you need 32GB of RAM just to be future-proof for the next 3 years".
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.
Fortunately many apps seem to be moving to native webviews now instead of shipping electron
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.
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.
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).
Vue is so good! I've been encouraged seeing more organizations mentioning using it (in the hiring thread etc.) lately.
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.
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.
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.
The sad reality is that easy tech explores solution space faster
One thing that bothers me about extreme bloat is that I do not want every app to push against the limit of what my computer can handle. It's fine if some game or compiler or such complex software do that every now and then. A common pro-bloat argument is that software should make use of all the hardware instead of leaving it idle, and that makes sense in some contexts. But 99% of the time I would prefer smaller things that I could have lots of and never have to worry about disk or RAM use.
I hate that argument too. The computer is there to serve ME, not to serve the software it runs. Each application should be using as little of the hardware as possible, to make it possible for ME to make use of all the software.
Bloat mostly reflects Conway's law, with the outcome of it being that you're building towards the people you're talking to.
If you build towards everyone, you end up with a large standard like Unicode or IEEE 754. You don't need everything those standards have for your own messages or computations, sometimes you find them counter to your goal in fact, and they end up wasting transistors, but they are convenient enough to be useful defaults, convenient enough to store data that is going to be reused for something else later, and therefore they are ubiquitous in modern computing machines.
And when you have the specific computation in mind - an application like plotting pixels or ballistic trajectories - you can optimize the heck out of it and use exactly the format and features needed and get tight code and tight hardware.
But when you're in the "muddled middle" of trying to model information and maybe it uses some standard stuff but your system is doing something else with it and the business requirements are changing and the standards are changing too and you want it to scale, then you end up with bloat. Trying to be flexible and break up the system into modular bits doesn't really stave this off so much as it creates a Whack-a-Mole of displaced complexity. Trying to use the latest tools and languages and frameworks doesn't solve this either, except where they drag you into a standard that can successfully accommodate the problem. Many languages find their industry adoption case when a "really good library" comes out for it, and that's a kind of informal standardizing.
When you have a bloat problem, try to make a gigantic table of possibilities and accept that it's gonna take a while to fill it in. Sometimes along the way you can discover what you don't need and make it smaller, but it's a code/docs maturity thing. You don't know without the experience.
> Layers & frameworks. Modern software tends to be more complicated. Most of the time people don't write software from scratch, they usually use some library or framework.
Some. But when some reaches the value of more than 80 (i did today an ldd in /usr/bin and i puked), something must be really, really wrong (hello KDE).
The performance of a web service is largely dependant on how many calls and how quickly it can make calls to external services. If a given system is making 2 DB calls when it could instead make one, then that should be the initial focus for optimisation.
Indeed, if a language and framework has slow code execution, but facilitates efficient querying, then it can still perform relatively well.
> A significant part of this bloat is actually a tradeoff
Or actually not, and the list doesn't help go beyond "users have more resources, so it's just easier to waste more resources"
> Layers & frameworks
There are a million of these, with performance difference of orders of magnitude. So an empty reference explains nothing re bloat
But also
> localization, input, vector icons, theming, high-DPI
It's not bloat if it allows users to read text in an app! Or read one that's not blurry! Or one that doesn't "burn his eyes"
> Robustness & error handling / reporting.
Same thing, are you talking about a washing machine sending gigabytes of data per day for no improvement whatsoever "in robustness"? Or are you taking about some virtualized development environment with perfect time travel/reproduction, where whatever hardware "bloat" is needed wouldn't even affect the user? What is the actual difference between error handling in the past besides easy sending of your crash dumps?
> Engineering trade-offs. We accept a larger baseline to ship faster, safer code across many devices.
But we do not do that! The code is too often slower precisely because people have a ready list of empty statements like this
> Hardware grew ~three orders of magnitude. Developer time is often more valuable than RAM or CPU cycles
What about the value of time/resources of your users ? Why ignore reality outside of this simplistic dichotomy. Or will the devs not even see the suffering because the "robust error handling and reporting" is nothing of the sort, it mostly /dev/nulls a lot of user experience?
This article is awesome - I love the meme
As a former CS major (30 years ago) that went into IT for my first career, I've wondered about bloat and this article gave me the layman explanation.
I am still blown away by the comparison of pointing out that the WEBP image of SuperMario is larger in size than the Super Mario game itself!
The Mario picture is very misleading. It's not lossless. It has way too many colours. An actual lossless screenshot (albeit not as wide) is only 3KB:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NES_Super_Mario_Bros.png
Sorry. My bad. Looks like the size is also very sensitive to the method of compression and software as well (regardless of being PNG or WEBP). I found another PNG picture here https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/where-do-all-the-bytes-com... it is 64KiB. When you stretch the image, it's also likely to add kilobytes. I guess I need to update the image.
But anyways, I think it's still very demonstrative when an entire game size is smaller than its picture. Also consider that even your tiny PNG example (3.37KiB) still cannot fit into the the RAM / VRAM of a NES console which shows the contrast between these eras in regards of amounts of memory.
> I found another PNG picture here
That image has a similar problem to yours. It has been scaled up using some kind of interpolation which introduces a load of extra colours to smooth the edges. This is not a great fit for PNG, which is why it is 64KB.
The article claims that it is only 5.9KB. I guess it was that small originally and it's been mangled by the publishing process.
I think a more realistic comparison is a BMP image (16 or 256 color) because the game didn't compress the image the way PNG or WebP does. When I converted that tiny ~3KiB image to 16 color BMP the size was 28.1KiB, for 256 color it was 57KiB. But some colors were lost.
Anyways I don't think we can have 100% apple to apple comparison, because the game used a different compression and rendering technique. Also consider the actual amount of RAM / VRAM the images are occupying. In RAM / VRAM they are probably in a decompressed form which is much more memory.
I agree that there's no perfect comparison. I just think that whatever image format you use for the comparison, you should be storing an original picture, not one that has been stretched or otherwise modified.
FWIW, if you convert the 3KB image to 16 colours in GIMP (Image | Mode | Indexed... and choose "Generate Optimum Palette") it looks exactly the same. I'm pretty sure there are only 16 colours in the image. The resulting PNG is 1,991 bytes.
I work in enterprise, B2C software, lots of single page apps / self service portals, that kind of thing. I don't think our software is bloated per se; sure it could be faster, but for example when it comes to mobile apps, it's a tradeoff between having the best and fastest apps, being able to hire people, development speed, and non-functional requirements.
It's good enough, and for example React Native is spending years and millions in more optimizations to make their good enough faster, the work they do is well beyond my pay grade. (https://reactnative.dev/blog/2025/10/08/react-native-0.82#ex...)
As far as internal services go, I agree, being able to easily add stuff is the main priority.
For customer facing stuff, I think it's worth looking into frameworks that do backend templating and then doing light DOM manipulation to add dynamism on the client side. Frameworks like Phoenix make this very ergonomic.
It's a useful tool to have in the belt.
95% of portals could be done with 2000s tech (since they're basically CRUD apps) - the question is what it is worth to make them that way.
And the answer is almost always "nothing" because "good enough" is fine.
People like to shit on development tools like Electron, but the reality is that if the app is shitty on Electron, it'd probably be just as shitty on native code, because it is possible to write good Electron apps.
> but the reality is that if the app is shitty on Electron, it'd probably be just as shitty on native code
Right off the bat it'll save hundreds of MB in app size with a noticeable startup time drop , so no, it won't be just as shitty.
> because it is possible to write good Electron apps.
The relevant issue is the difficulty in doing that, not the mere possibility.
When I think of good Electron apps, the first name that pops to my mind is Visual Studio Code. They really did a lot of work to make the editor responsive and capable of sophisticated things without blowing your RAM/disk budget.
But it's still bloated compared to the editor I use, Emacs.
And it's still bloated compared to a Java-based IDE of equivalent functionality. (Eclipse and IntelliJ can do much more OOTB than VS Code can.)
When I click on some of stuff on the page Im getting redirected to spammy opera download pages
I guess that's that acceptable software bloat the site probably is talking about. :) (I have not clicked. I first read comments to find out if it's worth clicking.)
Lol. It's the behavior I see when there's a malicious chrome plugin installed. A link on a page loads a spam site randomly in a new tab, but the links works normal after that. Im pretty sure it's none of my plugins I guess.
Bloat is always bad.
That said, all of engineering is a tradeoff, and tradeoffs mean accepting some amount of bad in exchange for some amount of good.
In these times, though, companies seem to be very willing to accept bloat for marginal or nonexistent returns, and this is one of the reasons why, in my opinion, so much of the software being released these days is poor.
Sometimes bloat is forced on you.
I had to write Android app recently. I don't like bloat. So I disabled all libraries. Well, I did it, but I was jumping over many hoops. Android Development presumes that you're using appcompat libraries and some others. In the end my APK was 30 KB and worked on every smartphone I was interested (from Android 8 to Android 16). Android Studio Hello World APK is about 2 MB, if I remember correctly. This is truly madness.
The reason being that Android used to advocate how great it was versus J2ME fragmentation, a marketing move that only impressed those without experience, turns out that a great deal of appcompat code is actually to deal with Android fragmentation across OEMs and devices.
I used to release an Android app 10ish years ago (before I was banned by Google from releasing Android apps) and this was the case back then. Every time I opened Eclipse it would automatically add the 6MB "support library" to my otherwise 50kB app. There was no way to turn this off, but if you removed it, it would stay removed for that session. Usually I only noticed I'd forgotten when I built the final .apk and went to upload it to the App Store.
In the article, many tradeoffs are mentioned. The thing is, many of these tradeoffs are necessary to support the bloat, that is, bloat needs bloat.
- Layers & frameworks: We always had some layers and frameworks, the big one being the operating system. The problem is that now, instead of having these layers shared between applications (shared libraries, OS calls, etc...), every app wants to do their own thing and they all ship their own framework. For the calculator example, with the fonts, common controls, rendering code, etc... the global footprint was probably several MBs even in the early days, but the vast majority of it was shared with other applications and the OS shell itself, resulting in only a few extra kB for the calculator.
- Security & isolation: That's mostly the job of the OS and even the hardware. But the one reason why we need security so much is that the more bloated your code is, the more room there is for vulnerabilities. We don't need to isolate components that don't exist in the first place.
- Robustness & error handling / reporting: The less there is, the less can go wrong, so more robust and less errors to handle.
- Globalization & accessibility: That's true that it adds some bloat, however, that's something that the OS should take care of. If everyone uses the same shared GUI toolkit, only it has to deal with these issues. Note that many of these problems were addressed in the Windows 9x era.
- Containers & virtualization: Containerization is a solution to dependency hell and non-portable code, you carry your entire environment with you so you don't have to adjust to a new environment. The more dependencies you have, i.e. the most bloat, the more you need it. And going back to security and accessibility, since you are now shipping your environnement, you don't benefit from system-wide updates that address these issues.
- Engineering trade-offs: that is computers are cheap, developers are expensive. We are effectively trading time to hand-craft lightweight optimized software to keeping up with the bloat.
I get the author's point, but I believe that most of it is self-inflicted. I remember the early days of Android. I had a Nexus One, 512MB RAM / 1GHz single core CPU / 512MB Flash + 4GB MicroSD and it could do most of what I am doing now with a phone that is >10x more powerful in every aspect. And that's with internationalization, process isolation, the JVM, etc... Not only that but Google was much smaller back then, so much for lowering development costs.
I'm curious, can you vibe code assembly? Perhaps the AI's havent been trained on much of it.. But in theory you could get amazing performance without all the work? .. The only downside is you would have zero idea how the code works and it would be entirely unmaintainable.
I'm doing a bit with Z80/6502/x86_64 assembly with it, and a little C with sdcc and gcc. It's more fun than I thought it would be.
unfortunately the article is very offensive to anyone living outside of major urban centers, it presumes that along with our daily cake, that unlimited data and means to aquire it are only to be mentioned as trivialitys, if at all. rural devitalization is accelerating, with another article here describing how unreliable electrical power is in Calfornias country side I wont get into the details, but please imagine all the fun to be had attempting to turn off a win11 laptop, with hyper low speed and bandwidth internet, in order to try and save some battery in case the power does not come back on, which is the reality on most of our planets surface.
Bloat is OK when the alternative is worse. But have you really done the analyzes on how bad and how bigger the bloat is going to get? But it's still justified if the alternative is worse.
Sometimes I feel the biggest contribution React made to the world isn't it speeded up frontend dev or something. It's showing how much discussion about performance is pure paranoid.
Some maybe, however we have moved away beyond it being ok.
> Thanks to Microsoft abusing their position with GitHub to perform the legally questionable act of stealing billions of lines of GPL code
I think this a strawman?
But it's pretty ridiculous if anyone believes this.
FOSS code can't be "stolen." The whole point of GPL and free software movement is that software should be free to use and modify.
FOSS code can absolutely be stolen, if it's usage is in violation of the contract that it is shared under. In the case of the GPL, that means granting your users the same freedoms you were granted, which last I checked "Open"AI absolutely is not doing.
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I want to benchmark how much battery life Electron apps drain from my computer compared to the equivalent native apps. Then, we can talk about if bloat is OK.
P.S. Does someone know anyone who tested this?
You've used Electron and you need a benchmark to tell you if it is bloated?
I know it's bloated! I want to prove that so the evidence is clear on how much it affects people's day-to-day use.
If I could make one law related to software, it would be to ban React and React-like frameworks (includes Vue and Svelte I believe): if you have to put more than one line of HTML in your JavaScript, if you have VDOM, if you have a build step - I want this to be illegal. It is entirely possible to write a js-framework that attaches itself to DOM from the top, without any kind of expensive hydration steps or VDOM or templating (I've built one). React is a horrible complex monster that wastes developers time, heats up users' CPUs and generally feels super slow and laggy. 99% percent of websites would work a lot better with SSR and a few lines of JavaScript here and there and there is zero reason to bring anything like React to the table. React is the most tasteless thing ever invented in software.
> React and React-like frameworks (includes Vue and Svelte I believe)
Putting React with those two is a wild take.
> 99% percent of websites would work a lot better with SSR and a few lines of JavaScript here and there and there is zero reason to bring anything like React to the table.
Probably but as soon as you have a modicum of logic in your page the primitives of the web are a pain to use.
Also, I must be able to build stuff in the 1% space. I actually did it before: I built an app that's entirely client-side, with Vue, and "serverless" in the sense that it's distributed in the form of one single HTML file. Although we changed that in the last few months to host it on a proper server.
The level of psychological trauma that some back-end devs seem to endure is hilarious though. Like I get it, software sucks and it's sad but no need to be dramatic about it.
And btw, re forbidding stuff: no library, no process, no method can ever substitute to actually knowing what you're doing.
You can do very complex stuff without any need for React like approach. I literally said I've written a very sophisticated framework that was exceptionally snappy - that's what should be used for that 1% (not my framework, but the approach). Even better, I could introduce it very gradually and strategically on different SSR pages and then (if I wanted to) I could turn the whole app into an SPA - all without needing to "render" anything with JavaScript, VDOM or other such nonsense.
Is this framework public? I think the same way as you and developed my own framework with/out the things you mentioned and would like to compare my approach with yours. Biggest difference is that I use lit-html for templating, which is quite efficient.
Kind of, but not really. I'll make it public soon when I have the documentation ready.
> It is entirely possible to write a js-framework that attaches itself to DOM from the top, without any kind of expensive hydration steps or VDOM or templating (I've built one)
Can you elaborate more on how this works? Do you mean JS loading server generated HTML into the DOM?
Server renders the page. Suppose you have a element there which reads like <div data-component="HenloComponent">...</div>. Then the .js framework which was loaded on that page queries the DOM in search of any elements with data-component attribute and creates instances of HenloComponent (which is a class written by you, the developer, user of the framework). It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the essence of it.
Note that with this approach you don't need to "render" anything, browser already done it for you. You merely attaching functionality to DOM elements in the form of Component instances.
Yes, that is what I was asking about.
I entirely agree. It is what I do when I have to - although I mostly do simple JS as I am a backend developer really, and if I do any front end its "HTML plus a bit of JS" and I just write JS loading stuff into divs by ID.
When i have worked with front end developers doing stuff in react it has been a horrible experience. In the very worst case they used next.js to write a second backend that sat between my existing Django backend (which had been done earlier) and the front end. Great for latency! It was an extreme example but it really soured my attitude to complex front ends. The project died.
> In the very worst case they used next.js to write a second backend that sat between my existing Django backend (which had been done earlier) and the front end.
That's hilarious.
Casey Muratori truly is right when he says to "non-pessimize" software (= make it do what it should do and not more), before optimizing it.
Oh no, they do that? I thought Next.js is a fully functional backend itself, like Django. But I'm shocked to learn that it's just a middleman-backend to render templates that are already served from another backend.
Next.js is a a fully functional backend. Its not Next's fault - I dislike it for other reasons, but this was not a Next problem.
The problem was that the front end developers involved decided to use Next.js to replace the front end of a mostly complete Django site. I think it was very much a case of someone just wanting to use what they knew regardless of whether it was a good fit - the "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" effect.
It is Vercel's "fault" because it sold Next.JS as a BFF (Backend-for-frontend), a concept that didn't exist but helped them sell lots of hosting for React, something absolutely unexpected to every old school React developer.
I did not know they sold it as that.
I did a search and a lot of people are promoting the concept. Maybe it makes sense if you have a strong reason to use micro services, but for the vast majority of systems it seems crazy!
Why not ditch HTML itself? People are already downloading binary blobs on a daily basis anyway, just download some binary once, execute them in some isolated environment. So you only have to transmit data.
I don't see a problem with HTML. It's easy to learn, easy to use and a very nice format for web. CSS is also great. JavaScript is pretty great too. My point is that modern web is horrible because people with no taste and no understanding of the underlying technologies turned it into a horrible shitshow by inventing frameworks that turn the web upside down and making a bloat out of it. I don't hate many things in life, but this one - with passion, because every time I visit a website, I can just feel it's made with React because of how slow and laggy it is.
Do not know to what extent you are serious, but I think the idea is that content should be HTML and apps should be just JS.
We could go further and have a language written to run in a sandbox VM especially for that with a GUI library designed for the task instead of being derived from a document format.
Yeah, I think my point was misunderstood: part of what I'm opposed to was writing HTML (or worse, CSS) inside .js files.
Yes, I think you were misunderstood.
I think HTML inside JS is a code smell. I cannot even imagine why you would need CSS inside JS.
lit-html templating inside JS is a code smell?
Ehrm, have you seen how fancy UI stuff is being implemented in so-called "native apps" these days? Anything more complicated than a button or label or other elements familiar since 1993 gets shoved into a webview and rendered with HTML and CSS.