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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Every application comes with an entire operating system's worth of code nowadays.

Download a desktop chat client or a little menu bar utility — each app includes its own copy of Electron at 150MB.

Make a "Hello world" web client app using React with the recommended "create-react-app" toolchain — your project will first download nearly 200MB of code via npm (and each project you start will have its own copy of this stuff).

Make a web server with a framework like Rails, Vert.x or whatever — be prepared to spend hours downloading dependencies and setting up your local environment just so.

I don't have any good ideas for how to break this cycle. By 2028, I expect every to-do app will include its own 4GB copy of Ubuntu because it's convenient.

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> I don't have any good ideas for how to break this cycle. By 2028, I expect every to-do app will include its own 4GB copy of Ubuntu because it's convenient.

2028? More like 2015. It’s already like that for much of what runs in Docker containers.

Kind of, except that the base ubuntu image is more like 70MB.

I was thinking of the Ubuntu desktop. Each desktop utility could be its own virtual machine, and it wouldn't be so far removed from what already happens with Electron.

see https://www.qubes-os.org/ and https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2018/01/22/qubes-air/

And if things are using the same base, you don't have multiple copies but only one copy of the base image.

Is it? Most people I’ve seen working with Docker have tried their best to use Alpine for everything. Even something with a lot of OS dependencies tends to end up at around 200MB on the high end.

my nginx image is around 16M until I add python (certbot)

I was an early critic (technorati objector) of the app server movement.

Then I needed to have a UI to monitor & manage a bunch of independent loosely coupled processes. Think poor man's workflow engine. Imagine my chagrin when I knowingly, faithfully recreated the Windows Task Manager for my stack.

I was very late to the Unix world. But I really think the Unix way is something akin to a golden law of the universe. Which each new cohort needs to rediscover for itself.

> and each project you start will have its own copy of this stuff

I don't get why npm can't setup a content addressed shared repository, something à la m2/maven. This seems like such a waste of space.

I'm not up to speed with filesystems, but IMHO content-addressing by default should be a standard feature as well.

Every cell in your body includes gigabytes worth of source code for the entire organism. Maybe this kind of redundancy isn’t such a bad idea? The industry has tried shared library schemes many many times and it always turns out to be a mess.

There's over 10^13 cells in the human body. If my computer had enough memory to fit 10 trillion copies of Electron, I wouldn't be complaining.

> If my computer had enough memory to fit 10 trillion copies of Electron, I wouldn't be complaining.

You would, once you saw the power bill. ;-) SCNR

I think there was a shift lost in the metaphor. Most people don't care if they have hundreds of copies of distros scattered around their humongous disks, but they might care if all those distros are running and actively using RAM and CPU cycles.

In the same vein, I'm pretty sure that while all those cells contain a copy of DNA, they don't all execute the whole copy all the time.

Deduping in ram anyone?

https://theithollow.com/2012/12/17/memory-de-duplication-in-...

The set of dependencies that comes with CRA (and other similar tools) includes:

- A compiler

- A bundler/linker

- An optimizing minifier

- A linter

- A development server with live reloading

- A test runner

All of those are isolated and scoped to that one project, and they are all build-time dependencies only. The build output you actually deploy is just static JS/HTML/CSS files, and developers are encouraged to keep those at a few hundred KB tops.

It's also important to understand that Javascript packages are effectively distributed as source, which affects the number of files on disk. (Granted, many NPM packages do include unnecessary files in the published artifacts, but Javascript itself is a major factor there.)

Meanwhile, XCode is supposedly something like 8GB installed, Visual Studio is multiple gigs, and if you were to look at the actual file size on disk of any C++ compiler toolchain, that would be a minimum of several dozen megs - those are just usually preinstalled on Linux or Mac systems.

So, context is pretty important here. A couple hundred MB for a complete JS build toolchain is perfectly fine :)

I've seen embedded device which runs on yocto/poky flavour of Linux, and the main app chroots into Ubuntu 14.04 for no apparent reason.

you wish, more like each subcomponent of ubuntu will contain its own full operating system enviroment itself aswell.

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