What's the point of being healthy when they have rascal scooters?
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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Programming
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here I am, using my legs like a sucker.
Not to judge, but you're supposed to walk on them, not suck them.
Don't tell me how to live my life.
...and that's why you need 16GB and a decent CPU to navigate the web
What is utterly stupid is with modern compression and rendering techniques - if it weren't for developers shipping a whole ass library to prod for one function that is simplifying 8 lines of code... 56k would still be usable for light browsing and access. It'd be slow still.. But far from literally impossible now.
The sheer amount of "fat" on some (most) sites and applications is just depressing.
Back in the day when we were all amazed at Yahoo!'s loading speed I pulled the homepage HTML. 79K. Imagine that.
tab hoarder like me needs 64GB, got it when was cheap
This isn't a very good article IMHO. I think I agree (strongly) with what it's trying to say, but as it's written, it just isn't it.
Wrappers and VMs and bytecodes and runtimes are bad: they make life easier but they are less efficient and make issues harder to troubleshoot.
Runtimes/"VMs" like the JVM also allow nice things like stack traces. I don't know about the author but I much prefer looking at a stack trace over "segmentation fault (core dumped)". Having a runtime opens new possibilities for concurrency and parallelism too.
The COSMIC desktop looks like GNOME, works like GNOME Shell, but it's smaller and faster and more customisable because it's native Rust code.
This just doesn't make any sense. COSMIC is more configurable because it wants to be, this has absolutely nothing to do with Rust vs Javascript.
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson knew this. That's why Research Unix evolved into Plan 9, which puts way more stuff through the filesystem to remove whole types of API. Everything's in a container all the time, the filesystem abstracts the network and the GUI and more.
And here the author just contradicts themselves. So wrappers, runtimes and VMs are bad, except when it's Ken Thompson doing it in which case adding containers and a language runtime into a kernel is a great idea actually?
Lastly, I didn't address the efficiency arguments in the quotes because it's mostly just true... but I do think it requires some more careful consideration than "JS bad Rust good". Consider this unscientific sample of different apps on my PC and how much of my (expensive!) RAM they use:
- Spotify (Electron): 1G
- Ghostty (Zig/GTK): 235M
- Decibels (Typescript/GTK): 140M
- Anyrun (Rust/GTK): 110M
Note that Electron, and only Electron, is a supermassive black hole of bloat. Whatever is going on here, it's not Javascript.
Even Electron apps can be small: Stretchly, a break reminder, normally takes something like 20 MB of memory.
Still has about 20 abstractions to simulate a GUI in a Document Object Model. And the framework for your small code has more loc than your OS.
What the hell are you talking about? Who are you talking to?
You don't need a ‘framework’ to write JavaScript. And HTML doesn't ‘simulate’ a GUI, it in fact provides a paradigm and an engine ready for rendering gobs of text, images and whatnot, on which any other typical GUI framework would choke like a little baby. And you would have to implement any minuscule element from scratch in godforsaken C++ of all things.
Maybe learn a thing or two of what you're trying to speak about.
provides a paradigm and an engine […], on which any other typical GUI framework would choke like a little baby
Uhuh. And how you think it does that?
Do you imagine that it abstracts an underlying GUI framework?
Please tell me, how would an HTML engine render something like a few paragraphs of text flowing around embedded images whatever which way, if it did that over a traditional framework like Qt/Gtk/etc.
That's what i say, minimized webbrowsers are a slight bit less bloaty but still make for bloaty GUI frameworks.
Less bugs, less maintenance work. All code is a debt, either you or the users have to pay.
- The fastest code is the code you don't run.
Not really. The code can be slow, even if I do not run it. Also, sometimes additional code can do optimization (like caching), which is more code = faster. Or additional libraries, complexity and code paths can in example add multicore execution, which could speed up. So, I do not buy the less code is faster logic.
I think it really depends on what your code is doing. I do agree that less isn't always faster or as they mentioned in the post, safer. Taking a raw input is fast, but not very safe for a variety of reasons. I personally make "simple to understand" as the highest priority for my code.
On a slightly different example, the suckless project has a huge emphasizes on lightweight code, which they call "suckless". I don't think in this case faster is the goal, but having less code and be simple as possible (not even configuration files allowed, you just recompile program) and almost no documentation in the code either. But the idea is the same, of having "lightweight" code.
I think the most obvious example is loop unrolling. An unrolled loop can be many times more code, but runs faster because you're not updating a counter or doing conditional jumps.
Scale. If it’s small it’s simple but it if grows it scales better.