Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hug 2326 days ago
While weight is a factor in professional car racing, and while I've built a go-kart that is significantly lighter in weight than a professional racing car, it is not a particularly impressive achievement that I have managed to do so, and I wouldn't think to criticize a race team for the weight of their vehicle.
3 comments

Good thing we’re discussing JavaScript library sizes and not cars in random contexts, then.

77kb gzipped is massive considering it’s only doing one thing. If I want my website to load in ~100 milliseconds or less (or even 1 second or less!), I absolutely do need to pay attention to all the libraries I add.

I can and do criticize software developers for making hideously bloated websites because they don’t pay attention to what they add. Not only are a lot of modern websites wasteful, they’re painful or outright useless on slow mobile connections—not a problem for software developers on fibre networks, beefy dev machines, etc.

So it turns out that the use-case for a polyfill of a 77KB image decoder isn't particular suited to a site you want to load in sub 100ms. Oddly, though, that's not the only usecase in the world, and there are circumstances where saving ~30% on every image load turns out to be significantly more efficient than not loading a 77KB JS library.

In other news, I also chose to forgo adding a 15 lb. fuel pump to my go-kart, despite the fact that every NASCAR team in the world uses one, and my go-kart drives just fine. I should go tell the NASCAR teams that fuel pumps are a terrible idea. I clearly know something they don't.

You are missing the point. It's not only about the transferred bytes. You have to actually execute 77kB to display an image. Every image.
I am most assuredly not missing the point. Your use-case is not my use-case.

I sometimes render 50mb PNGs. The execution of decoder is insignificant compared to everything else.

Also, my go-kart also gets more miles to the gallon than NASCAR team cars.

> I sometimes render 50mb PNGs. The execution of decoder is insignificant compared to everything else.

Fair point but you have to admit that is a very niche use case.

Have you compared the execution to native performance? Even decoding a 50MB JPEG in Chrome with turbojpeg is going to be a hard pill to swallow.

I do know it's a niche use case. And I for sure wouldn't recommend that every man and his dog use the polyfill. I'm not even sure it's right for the scenario I'm thinking of. But I can definitely contrive a case where it is.

I haven't benchmarked this specific thing, because I've never used it. But I might, because it sounds like a fun thing to do.

If we are in the space of compression than i think its relavent.
Go home, GPT-2, you're drunk.
underrated comment