[nexuist]

> don't believe right-to-left languages or focus order inevitably leads to hundreds of thousands of lines of code or 50+ MB binaries

It does. It literally does. Try writing your own operating system, or font parser, or graphics engine. The work our shitty React apps sit on top of is unimaginably complex. It would take centuries for one single person to grasp what is going on in an iOS "Hello World" app.

It's not simple, at all. Especially not for a video streaming service! I mean, my God, just being able to understand the codecs and licensing issues would take you months, let alone writing decoders that run natively on every platform. Let alone dealing with monitors and color schemes and HDMI and Chromecast streaming and window resizing and bandwidth limits and buffering and....

It's not simple.

EDIT: For reference, vim, a Hacker News favorite and widely considered one of the most popular TUIs ever built, is currently sitting at about 1.2 million lines of code. All it does is edit text files. Imagine if it had to play video.

[d110af5ccf]

> For reference, vim

Vim is an incredibly useful tool but I've seen frequent complaints about its codebase. Competitors with significantly higher code quality exist (ex Kakoune).

> > don't believe ... inevitably leads to

> It does. It literally does. Try writing your own operating system, or font parser, or graphics engine.

There are working examples of such and the code appears to be significantly simpler than the status quo. I'm far from an expert here but to the best of my understanding feature creep combined with maintaining backwards compatibility is to blame for a significant amount of current complexity.

Consider that if you rewrite a low level API with the benefit of hindsight, everything that uses that API has to be updated. Often multiple distinct APIs will be involved though, not just one. Look at the difficulty the Linux ecosystem has had gaining full support for Wayland, which necessitated the likes of PipeWire and a number of other new ways of doing things, and has been "nearly ready" for production for how many years now?

[sangnoir]

> There are working examples of such and the code appears to be significantly simpler than the status quo

Status quo is bloated -> someone rewrites a simple replacement -> becomes popular -> "Can you cover this reasonable use case, it's not currently supported" -> repeated previous step several hundred times -> oh fuck, the "lightweight" rewrite has become the bloated status quo -> GOTO step one

[titzer]

In some sense, this is WAI. Hopefully along the cycle, people learn to build better architectures that are modular, scriptable, customizable, and not giant monolithic piles. If things were more scriptable, then I as a user could script them how I want creating of a wall of my own "UI" and then swapping out the backends as I see fit. In my 25 years or so programming, I wish I had done this more; scripts for everything. Learn how to use my own scripts and only adjust them when stuff breaks/is swapped out. In retrospect, I have been buffeted by the whims of UI designers for decades, and I'm kinda mad about it.

[nexuist]

> There are working examples of such

For whom do they work for? The author and maybe a small group of Internet hobbyists? When you have to support 3 billion daily active users like iOS or Windows does, that lightweight codebase isn't so lightweight anymore.

And sure, Prime Video isn't Windows, but it still has over 200 million international subscribers that it needs to handle. It's definitely not something you can write in an afternoon.

[saagarjha]

> It would take centuries for one single person to grasp what is going on in an iOS "Hello World" app.

Not really. Several years, maybe.

[nexuist]

I have been developing iOS apps since 2014, and was active in the jailbreaking scene before then. I don't believe any one person understands the entirety of what is going on when they launch an app. Remember, iOS is based on macOS, which is based on NeXTSTEP, last released in 1995!

iOS has been plagued by a whole host of bugs from the 90s and below. Remember effective Power? (https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/189064/364414) A Unicode memory allocation bug, the code for which was probably written decades ago and intended to run on a CRT monitor. I find it hard to believe anyone at Apple had interacted with that code since the initial iPhone release. Probably nobody at Apple in 2015 knew it existed. It's so unfathomably complicated.

[saagarjha]

I started working on iOS apps around that time as well, soon after I started programming. If you put your mind to it tracing the startup process of an iOS app is not actually as difficult as you think it is, especially if you skim things like “how does RunningBoard manage my app’s lifecycle?” or “is this launch being logged by CoreDuet?”. Also, FWIW, Core Text has several engineers working on it–text rendering is not a solved problem in the slightest–and is public API depended on directly by many apps.