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by rawoke083600 1454 days ago
Looks interesting...

One critique is "light/tiny/lightweight" whenever I read about software being "light" I cringe and get an eye-twitch(ok not really). But adding "light" or claiming your product is "light" means usually nothing other than its new.

Sure it might start out as small/lightweight but usually this is because the software is new.

Once you start adding in corner-cases (the ones you haven't even thought about) some iterations of bug fixes (hey we all human programmers in the end), mix in a good dose of pull-request from helpful contributors (User:'Your library looks great, if you accept this PR it will fit my needs perfectly.') and finally bring it up to par with a competitor of two (over time of course !).

Your now light software is no longer light !

What is the answer ? To be honest I don't have one, but to say knucckle down and be sure to say no often enough and have a laser focus on the exact problem your software is solving. Of course it seldom the case in real life with real software :)

Anywhoo ! Congrats on actually releasing something :)

5 comments

Preact, Mithril, Zod, etc. There are plenty of projects that have remained relatively light by saying “no” repeatedly to things which are outside their scope or would introduce unwarranted bloat.
Reminds me of https://suckless.org
Did they really ??

Looking at latest version of Preact v 10.5.14.zip (887kb) vs Preact v8.5.0.zip(90kb). So that is almost a x10 size increase in two years.

You're doing something wrong. I just tested now. Preact 8.5.0 is 3.2kb minified+brotlied. Preact 10.8.2 (latest) is 3.7kb. That's a very small increase.
I think you right. I just downloaded the "tagged software version" from github.
Thanks and love the feedback. I know the dev space is full of cliche and overused terms. It's tough to not use them even when you're aware. I don't see it as a hard rule to avoid them and I think in some cases it's okay.

For example, if the core goal of the library is to achieve <2kB and you've predetermined a tight API scope (most likely based on existing references) then IMO it's okay to call it tiny/lightweight. It works out with libraries that are a providing a set of primitives to solve a generalized problem. I'm sure some people appreciate like I do when a library clearly indicates a core goal that was achieved (i.e. size) right in the top-level description.

I'm not sure that's really true for something like this, I've been working on something similar myself in these past few months, it got to about 5kb min+gzipped with all things included, and there's _a lot_ included, but if you only include the functions provided by this tiny library I wouldn't expect it to be much much larger than it, maybe a 2x or something? That's still small, fixes and performance optimizations tend to cost something, but you will never have to pay 10kb to use those 6 functions basically, the rest will be tree-shaken off.
I still don't mind people calling it light if it is though; maybe it gets removed later, however when it (still) is light, it makes it easy for me to search for so I can prevent overall project bloat.
This is only 850B, to me that was useful info that was mentioned in the headline. Yes it might get larger in the future or it might not.