On another forum, I was complaining about how Microsoft was planning to remove WordPad from Win11. I was advised that installing OpenOffice or LibreOffice was an appropriate replacement. I replied that WordPad was only 3 megs large, as opposed to the recommended replacements, which are decidedly larger.
I guess not everybody appreciates tight code, but I surely do. Things like this are amazingly impressive.
Anyway don’t install OpenOffice for any reason, just pick libreoffice or onlyoffice.
OpenOffice doesn’t get a functional/security/compatibility update since 2014.
Sometimes a program is slow to start up because it’s so boated that just loading it from the disk takes multiple seconds. Wasting a few kB doesn’t hurt anything, but if you’re doing it thousands of times in one program, your users are gonna have a bad time.
Code is rarely the biggest thing in these programs. You want textures that don’t look stretched and pixelated at 4K? That’s going to cost you.
Look in any game directory. There’s probably a one big file–sometimes a few big ones–in there that you can rename to .zip and unpack it as one. It will dump all the textures/sound effects/etc. in the game, but have zero code. It will be something like 70-90% of the game’s entire space.
Yes, in Games. There, the longer the more, duplicated assets too (like, all the data in every level package, even though every level only needs 10% of the data). Because user storage is cheaper than optimization.
Sometimes in tools too, often crappy tools with abundance of animations. But usually it’s cheaply made software in a framework dragging lots of boilerplate with it. There it’s loc again.
No, not in office suites and Wordpad.
Btw, why is vector graphics so rarely used for simple icons?
Size doesn’t matter much when you have SSDs that read upwards of 5000mb/s. It’s why we’re seeing an advent of web-based apps despite them being woefully inefficient, and why games regularly go above 100gb. The reason file size gets so large is that assets can take up a lot of space and they come with plenty of libraries that they just have to bundle. These “small size” software optimize for size at other costs, like speed, asset quality, development time… Reducing file size is just not relevant anymore and if anything you should be wary of software that do it.
yeah, you know what?.. no. This is the kind of attitude that got us here to begin with. Yes, processers get faster, and yes size gets more available. But that shouldn’t be an excuse for poorly-written code.
An empty Microsoft Word document is larger than the first word processing program I ever used. That is just crazy when you think about it. but “oh people have lots of resources they’re not even using so it doesn’t matter”, right? When companies have this attitude of “oh the resources are there I may as well use all of them for myself” then their code runs like garbage and you need a faster computer just to make it work halfways decently. And because of this we all end up on this goddamned technology treadmill where we have to keep buying bigger and faster and more expensive computers to do the same thing the old computers did just because the programs written for it are too bloated and the people writing the code couldn’t be arsed to make it work well. It wastes our time and our money. I reject that. I think others should too.
This is where you guys lose me, it’s just code that not optimized for size and that’s because most people don’t give a shit about that. People want want their 4k assets, their localization, their accessibility features, their application to run on any device… All this comes at a cost. You want to change things, that’s fine, but start by understanding why things are the way they are because shitting on developers won’t get you anywhere.
If you’re old enough, then the first word processing program you ever used was probably on a screen 640x480 pixels or smaller, didn’t support internationalization, couldn’t provide true WYSIWYG to match output between the screen and a printer, and couldn’t render fonts with anti-aliasing. Which of these features would you like to drop to reduce the size?
Everyone loves “tight” programs until they realize what they have to give up to make it work.
On another forum, I was complaining about how Microsoft was planning to remove WordPad from Win11. I was advised that installing OpenOffice or LibreOffice was an appropriate replacement. I replied that WordPad was only 3 megs large, as opposed to the recommended replacements, which are decidedly larger.
I guess not everybody appreciates tight code, but I surely do. Things like this are amazingly impressive.
Pick a lane, son.
Proceed to run a 13KB Javascript game in a browser.
Brother, look up kolibri os, then you’ll see some TIGHT code
AmigaOS 1.3 or bust.
I will die on this hill.
Menuet OS it is for me
Anyway don’t install OpenOffice for any reason, just pick libreoffice or onlyoffice. OpenOffice doesn’t get a functional/security/compatibility update since 2014.
I don’t particularly care about code size as a user or as a programmer.
Hard drive space is the cheapest thing you’ve got on a computer.
You could always run gentoo and use -Os … that can make things a lot smaller but also slower.
Sometimes a program is slow to start up because it’s so boated that just loading it from the disk takes multiple seconds. Wasting a few kB doesn’t hurt anything, but if you’re doing it thousands of times in one program, your users are gonna have a bad time.
What was it again, 1 critical bug every 1000 loc?
That’s why, code as much as needed but as less as possible.
Of course not measured in KB, because readable code takes a bit more space than clever hacks.
Counting in lines of code is the most stupid metric.
Code is rarely the biggest thing in these programs. You want textures that don’t look stretched and pixelated at 4K? That’s going to cost you.
Look in any game directory. There’s probably a one big file–sometimes a few big ones–in there that you can rename to .zip and unpack it as one. It will dump all the textures/sound effects/etc. in the game, but have zero code. It will be something like 70-90% of the game’s entire space.
I agree and disagree.
Yes, in Games. There, the longer the more, duplicated assets too (like, all the data in every level package, even though every level only needs 10% of the data). Because user storage is cheaper than optimization.
Sometimes in tools too, often crappy tools with abundance of animations. But usually it’s cheaply made software in a framework dragging lots of boilerplate with it. There it’s loc again.
No, not in office suites and Wordpad.
Btw, why is vector graphics so rarely used for simple icons?
I just looked at how big LibreOffice Writer is, 210 MB as a portable app… Wow…
AbiWord Portable is probably the smallest and even that is 15 MB installed…
I was gonna say notepad but I just looked and its 18mb. granted I have a few plugins installed though.
Size doesn’t matter much when you have SSDs that read upwards of 5000mb/s. It’s why we’re seeing an advent of web-based apps despite them being woefully inefficient, and why games regularly go above 100gb. The reason file size gets so large is that assets can take up a lot of space and they come with plenty of libraries that they just have to bundle. These “small size” software optimize for size at other costs, like speed, asset quality, development time… Reducing file size is just not relevant anymore and if anything you should be wary of software that do it.
yeah, you know what?.. no. This is the kind of attitude that got us here to begin with. Yes, processers get faster, and yes size gets more available. But that shouldn’t be an excuse for poorly-written code.
An empty Microsoft Word document is larger than the first word processing program I ever used. That is just crazy when you think about it. but “oh people have lots of resources they’re not even using so it doesn’t matter”, right? When companies have this attitude of “oh the resources are there I may as well use all of them for myself” then their code runs like garbage and you need a faster computer just to make it work halfways decently. And because of this we all end up on this goddamned technology treadmill where we have to keep buying bigger and faster and more expensive computers to do the same thing the old computers did just because the programs written for it are too bloated and the people writing the code couldn’t be arsed to make it work well. It wastes our time and our money. I reject that. I think others should too.
This is where you guys lose me, it’s just code that not optimized for size and that’s because most people don’t give a shit about that. People want want their 4k assets, their localization, their accessibility features, their application to run on any device… All this comes at a cost. You want to change things, that’s fine, but start by understanding why things are the way they are because shitting on developers won’t get you anywhere.
If you’re old enough, then the first word processing program you ever used was probably on a screen 640x480 pixels or smaller, didn’t support internationalization, couldn’t provide true WYSIWYG to match output between the screen and a printer, and couldn’t render fonts with anti-aliasing. Which of these features would you like to drop to reduce the size?
Everyone loves “tight” programs until they realize what they have to give up to make it work.
Fonts can be handled by Windows itself.
I don’t care about internationalization, just EN-US is good enough.
Having more pixels doesn’t change asset sizes when the pixels used per asset are the same. Just show me the smaller button or use vector graphics.