Comment by ihnorton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ihnorton | Hacker News Reader

I am curious about final package size on various platforms when using this project. The download bundles for the related "fman" project vary considerably -- Win: 1MB; macOS: 23MB; Ubuntu: 39MB. The last number matches my experience with scripted Qt applications, at which point the size is comparable to a typical ~50-70 MB Electron app, at least for compressed downloads. Visual Studio Code is 44 MB on Windows and 65MB on Mac. Scriptable wrappers usually imply that the core Qt shared objects can't be pruned, and the wrappers themselves also add up, so that Windows number is impressive and intriguing!

I would also wonder about performance scaling. Are there good examples of "large" applications where CPython drives the main loop, as opposed to a scripting layer over a C++ core? CPython has a shallower optimization floor than Javascript+V8, and most larger Python GUI applications I've tried had noticeable lags (thinking of several visualization apps, and several Python-centric IDEs). I was similarly skeptical of Javascript-based desktop applications until recently, but Visual Studio Code has been very impressive.

I'd wager the Windows download is not the full app, rather just an installer. There's no way Qt and PyQt would fit in just 1MB on an OS that doesn't include those as shared libraries.

As a side note: I see the Arch Linux package is 16M, unlike Ubuntu's 39M. Perhaps the app needs a relatively recent Qt or PyQt release that is available from Arch's repos but not on the oldest supported Ubuntu and thus needs to be shipped.

Yeah, I finally got windows version to download (cut out a few times, HN overload?). The win download is an online installer, so the size makes much more sense. I didn’t check the install directory, but it took 2 minutes to retrieve on slowish WiFi, so I would expect the install size is in-line with the others. (Good point about Arch).

That is correct, the Windows binary is an online installer. The reason for this is that fman uses Google Omaha for its auto-update mechanism [1].

The Arch package is smaller because it declares PyQt as a dependency, rather than shipping it itself. The reason for this is that it was difficult otherwise to make the shipped version of PyQt libraries and dependencies compatible with the ones already on the system.

[1]: https://fman.io/blog/google-omaha-tutorial/

You care comparing installer size. Typically an installer is considerably smaller than the installed app size and usually the installer is deleted. So it's not really worth comparing installer sizes.

For comparison of installed size:

- Code.exe is 77MB (version 1.20.0)

- directory "C:\Program Files\Microsoft VS Code" is 225 MB

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