[cxr]

> The reason packages are so big is the complexity for an interesting app is irreducible

These kinds of claims demand data, not just bare assertions of their truthiness.

Firefox, as an app with an Electron-style architecture (before Electron even existed), was doing some pretty interesting stuff circa 2011 (including stuff that it can't do now, like give you a menu item and a toolbar button that takes you to a page's RSS feed), with a bunch of its application logic embodied in something like well under <250k LOC of JS.

The last time I measured it, a Hello World created by following create-react-app's README required about half a _gigabyte_ of disk space between just before the first `npm install` and "done".

That NPM programmers don't know _how_ to write code without the kind of complexity that we see today is one matter. The claim that the complexity is irreducible is an entirely different matter.

[shadowgovt]

Firefox's 250k LOC are riding on the millions of lines of code of the underlying operating system and GUI | TCP | audio toolkits that it used. To compare it to npm development, you would need to factor in the total footprint of every package that you had to install to compile Firefox in 2011.

... And I think it's an interesting question to ask why we can trust the security of, say, Debian packages and not npm, given how many packages I have to pull down to compile Firefox that I haven't personally vetted.

[cxr]

> Firefox's 250k LOC are riding on the millions of lines of code of the underlying operating system and GUI | TCP | audio toolkits that it used.

Right, just like every other Electron-style app that exists. The comparison I made was a fair one.

> To compare it to npm development, you would need to factor in the total footprint of every package that you had to install to compile Firefox in 2011.

No, you wouldn't. That's a completely off-the-wall comparison.

How many lines of application code (business logic written in JS including transitive NPM dependencies before minification) go into a typical Electron app in 2021? Into a medium sized web app? Is the heft-to-strength ratio (smaller is better) less than that of Firefox 4, about the same, or ⋙?

[Aeolun]

After I compile my Rust or C app (and pull all attendant libraries to make that possible, spread all over my system) I’ve downloaded about 500MB of code. The resultant binary is 10MB.

If I do the same thing with my JS app, I still download a bunch of libraries, but puts them all in node_modules. That’s also about 500MB. The resulting compiled/built code is around 2MB.

I dunno, seems roughly the same.

[cxr]

It sounds like you're using the React Hello World example to respond to the comparison to Firefox. They're separate points which stand on their own.

With respect to the package size issue, the 500MB-to-2MB observation does not bode well for the claim of irreducibility.