That topics always made me curious tho....take a sample AAA games back then has smaller size compared to shitty Unity 2D games nowadays and i wonder why ?
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
838 points (100.0% liked)
Programmer Humor
21742 readers
2340 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Simple reason - dependencies.
Modern devs dump any dependency and sub-dependency under the sun into their project and don't bother about optimizing it. That's how you end up with absurdly large applications. Especially electron is a problem in this regard.
You can still write optimized and small software. However, for most businesses, it's just not worth their time. Rather using an additional couple hundred megabytes of dependencies on the client system.
In terms of programming, absolutely some bloat there.
But I would wager a majority (or plurality) would actually be high(er) res media assets, embedded animations and video etc.
uh, please do ask, why does opening a fucking glorified text and image processing app require 1 gigabyte of ram.
Who wrote this software? The guy from the bible who was the model for greed and gluttony? Jesus christ.
It's like Moore's law. The number of bytes for a basic app doubles every 2.5 years.
When I was young, we'd get a few different games games on a single 1.4 Mb floppy disk. The games were simpler, sure, but exactly the same games now would be far bigger in bytes.
At least games make sense, as the graphics get better. Though in some cases, the compression is also better. Like PS5 games are smaller on average than their PS4 versions, even though they have higher resolution textures in most cases, just because the PS5 has better compression/decompression tech.
Better than that, the lack of reliance on spinning disks means that asset duplication and data read order is less of a requirement to reduce load times. It can still be argued that there's just too many polygons, since simply scaling things back would be plenty effective in reducing storage usage and load times.
The other problem for bigger GB games is texture resolution. Games don’t always need 8K or 4K textures. 2K is good enough.
Compression is mostly done in software.
uh, bad news for you.
All programming is done in software my guy.
Games is the one example that actually makes sense though. The game code size hasn't really increased tremendously, but the uncompressed assets have only gotten more detailed and more numerous.
Why are you asking? Are you trying to prematurely optimize these apps?
They only came out 10 years ago. If we optimize now, how will we integrate an AI chat agent feature next year?
*shifty eyes* Um yes
There's lots of valid reasons for this.
Imo the biggest one people don't account for is this: Dev salaries are incredibly high. if you want fast performance the most optimal way would be to target the platform and use low level native code, so C++ or Swift.
It would cost you like 20x more than just using electron and it will cost you bigly if you have multiple platforms to maintain.
So it turns out having 1 team crunching out an app on electron with hundreds of dependencies is cheaper, naturally that's what most companies will do.
Don't want to use electron ? Then it's kind of the same issue except this time you're using Java and C# and you have to handle platform specific things on your own (think audio libraries for example). It's definitely doable but will be more costly than using a cross platform chromium app.
The hp printer app says it needs your location to connect to WiFi. It says it needs your location all the time when not using the app, again to connect to WiFi
I think that's to do with how permissions work.
Having wi-fi access can technically tell the app where you're located so you need to give it location access
Which is stupid because it then also gets GPS access.
Can confirm.
Now, I just need to know why my calculator needs access to my contacts.
That's because it gets lonely and needs someone to text.
Stares at Mullvad...
I just updated Epic Games Launcher. BEHOLD:
1st update
2nd update
Almost a gigabyte for a mostly blank interface, wtf.
i have a better one, corsair ICUE. 4gb for a fucking png simulator.
God, I hate Corsair. Not only do you need to download their garbage software to fucking turn off the RGB on a headset, you have to have it running or the RGB will turn on again!
OpenRGB was my solution to almost all my RBG woes. It doesn’t work for everything but they have a compatibility page and it’s like 5-10mb.
Thanks for sharing that. My device isn’t listed, but I’d be surprised if Corsair changed how their shit works that much between devices. I’ll give it a try (it supposedly even works on Linux <3)
Tap for spoiler
Get electroned
I'd rather have the Rickroll, please 😐
AHHH, please trigger warning
Marketing. Corporate leadership has decided marketing knows better software design than actual engineers.
Bro, just use AI, bro, you don't need developers, bro, also skip the testing, bro, who is going to hack your SaaS, bro
Just let ai code bro its so much better and more reliable, just does what its told it works so good bro, ai is the future its so smart.
It's just that we have to make space for our 5,358 partners and the telemetry data they need.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Cheaper & faster development by leveraging large libraries/frameworks, but inability to automatically drop most unused parts of those libraries/frameworks. You could in theory shrink Electron way down by yoinking out tons of browser features you're not using, but there's not much incentive to do it and it'd potentially require a lot of engineering work.
load more comments
(2 replies)
view more: next ›