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Comment by ameliaquining | Hacker News Reader

The big advantage of doing it this way is that, for users, it Just Works. They never get incomprehensible error messages telling them that they've got an incompatible version of libwhatever.dll when they try to load your app. I remember well the bad old days of Java desktop apps in the early 2000s, where this problem was omnipresent. Moving away from that was a major boon to users, and I don't ever want to go back.

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And now many java apps bundle their own JRE (at least on windows).

Like anything else it's a tradeoff, and for the average user not having to install separate dependencies (at least on windows and mac) is going to be easier, and 50 or 100 mb isn't something anyone is going to really have an issue with in the vast majority of cases.

Slack for example is 192 MB. I guess if everyone had that theory I might have 30 extra copies 6 extra gigabytes. More importantly I would have to ensure I killed apps lest say a calculator app or editor ruin my battery life by itself for the dubious privilege of rendering a blinking cursor.

Like I said it's a tradeoff.

For you, it sounds like it hurts more than it helps, but for others the options may be:

1. Don't use slack at all because they can't figure out how to install the correct version of libthingy.dll. Or they don't get the app at all because it's not for their platform.

2. Use slack

And in that scenario, the option they went with wins hands down.

I'm not saying it's perfect, and I still believe that giving both options would be a benefit for most, but the fact that it is done this way wasn't a "mistake", it was a tradeoff for the targeted audience solving problems that many had.

You're not really being fair here. You could just as well distribute all needed dll's with the app. In fact, that's pretty much what Electron does.

Why not ship an installer that checks for and appropriately installs DLLs?

Doesn't sound that bad on desktop. The binaries for Qt or the java JVM are not small either.

I suppose it's a problem on mobile though.

Hmmm.

Qt programs are pretty small. Java are bigger but still much much smaller than any Electron-based program.

IIRC JRE is about 50 MB. Probably less. So even if you include it with your Java program, it's STILL smaller than Electron programs.

Java was the problem here. DLL hell is a problem if you don't ship with the needed DLLs. Which you shouldn't do in the first place.

I‘ve had a bunch of electron apps show incomprehensible Javascript errors at launch. Technology doesn‘t prevent people from distributing poorly tested code.

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