Honestly I feel like it’s a thing that is becoming better as time goes on. A lot of people say the opposite, but it’s the 2010s that things went really south. Electron being the prime offender. A lot of what made bloat maddeningly big is starting to get scaled back.
Electron is very slowly being phased out in favor of Tauri (Electron binary size 127mb compared to Tauri’s 6mb). NodeJS is slowly getting phased out in favor of Deno (Lighter, more secure). There’s been a trend of re-writing things with Rust which makes things faster and tiny. Most bloated apps now usually have an open source alternative that does the same thing better (see for example OBS as opposed to how I had to fight with my system to record my screen before that)
The reason big tech companies like Microsoft and Facebook are so chalk full of bloat is because they’re using old technology, and they’re in too deep that they don’t have the time to re-write a decade of progress in something else. If you use the right tools nowadays though, I feel like you’re likely to get much better results.
Also the trash trend of dynamic languages is also falling out of favor. Took like two decades, but now JS getting replaced with Typescript means the morons writing it will mess up less. Now all we need is a way to make WASM (Web Assembly) viable and we can kiss javascript internet bloat goodbye. I, for one, think it’s looking pretty good.
Side note: someone in the comments of that article compared people writing bad code to 1984. Lol.
Other side note: Dude writing this article is the developer of Gratitious Space Battles. Hey, I used to really love that game.
If you thought that comment was insane, check out the website of the fschmidt commenter, specifically the last link at the bottom of this about page.
Bruv, I skipped through most of that and saw this interesting line at the footer
You also should consider the fact that if humanity itself becomes worthless, then good software no longer has any value. To fight the degeneration of humanity, you might also consider my Arkian project.
Then things got really wild. I don’t wanna derail this thread too much, but that dude literally owns a cult where he wants to do a noah’s ark style system where he only allows intelligent or very religious people in where they would be “safe from genetic decay” and be the perfect family. It’s TempleOS levels of screaming for help. Dude needs to chill out and see a therapist. Wild stuff.
There’s an argument in saying that putting everything in libraries makes it easier to maintain code.
And then you look at the Node.js ecosystem, the NPM package manager specifically, and are proven very wrong.
In my opinion there should be a few big libraries which do lots of things grouped into a sane domain. E.g. Python’s pillow library does image processing.
I recommend learning Plan9 as a therapy session. Also BSDs or Void Linux are a good way to run computers without most of the bloat.
What is plan9 exactly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
If you are interested in learning, check out SDF’s Plan9 bootcamp running from June 20th: https://sdf.org/plan9/
Thanks
You might also like this introductory video from adventuresin9 – it’s how I got started with plan9.
yep, its ridiculous. and its only going to get worse
I’m hoping, performance will become somewhat of an objective again, due to the chip shortage…
