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by userbinator 2183 days ago
Regardless of whether you think all those components are necessary, there is still the question of whether the amount of space they require is justified; JavaScript is a high-level language, and in fact one of the higher-level ones in comparison to things like C/C++. 1KB of JS should be able to do far more than 1KB of C or even binary.

Thus, 100MB of JS is astoundingly huge. It's roughly the same size as all the binaries in a full install of Windows 95, with all its features and drivers.

In the spirit of https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html perhaps we need a list of "Things an empty Rails app is smaller than".

It takes a ton of cycles out of development googling "can I use feature X in browser Y".

...or you could just avoid the trendchasing and use a minimal subset that you are sure will work everywhere, but that's a different discussion.
3 comments
jmole 2183 days ago
"1KB of JS should be able to do far more than 1KB of C or even binary"

This doesn't make sense and isn't a relevant comparison.

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lowtolerance 2182 days ago
I completely disagree with the premise that a high-level language should be able to do substantially more work with the same amount of code as C. That is not the point of a high-level language, not even close. The point of a high-level language is simply to abstract away some of the more difficult problems inherent to programming closer to the metal.

And as far as languages go, JavaScript is not nearly so far removed from raw machine code as most interpreted languages.

100MB of JavaScript code is not “astoundingly huge” at all , considering the bulk of that is tooling. Compared to the tooling for many other commonly used C/C++ development environments, 100MB is pretty modest.

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lacker 2183 days ago
At $50 for a 1TB hard drive, that 100MB is costing you half a cent. It doesn’t get sent to users over the network so it doesn’t affect performance. Why does that matter again?
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Arnt 2183 days ago
106MB of source code is perhaps five million lines of code, if written in a typical way. Some people use longer lines, not so many "{" lines, but anyway.

Storing five million lines of code is cheap, sure, no question. But don't you feel curious about how why you need that much code in the first place?

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