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Can great software live in 130 kilobytes?
blogs.zdnet.com — We need to see more programs like Utorrent, programs that are not 'bloatware'. Ludvig can do it, why can't you?
nouhad- 1297 diggs
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- jeorge, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2truely the best torrent client, i salute you ludde!
- nouhad, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2its THE best bittorent client there is.
- 1c3d0g, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1µTorrent FTW. Everyone should try this piece of software, it's the best thing since sliced bread!
- jarsonic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I've actually really enjoyed using µTorrent since I discovered it in September. Small and efficient, it has a surprising number of features given its small footprint.
It definately doesn't take minutes to load the way Azureus always did on my system. - uncle_dad, on 10/12/2007, -4/+0I don't see how anyone needs any more that 680k
-paraphrased form Bill Gates - Chapter80, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2... paraphrased since the limit was 640K!
...Not to mention he denies ever having said it...
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,1484,00.html - nouhad, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0haha lol Bill Gates in denial
- joel2600, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Azureus may take longer to load than uTorrent, but it's very worth it for the amount of features and functionality you get.
- jinexile, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6In this age where people just say "memory/storage is cheap," I applaud those willing to refactor their code until it does the absolute most with the absolute least.
- SparQy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5
@joel2600: you should try µTorrent again -- I felt the same way you did until I noticed the latest version practically mirrors Azureus for features! - nouhad, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0agreed, spargy
- bluehouse, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3It's the frickin .NET framework that bloats my code. I write c# apps that are 30k but when it runs it uses 20MB of memory!
- ziffel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"In this age where people just say "memory/storage is cheap," I applaud those willing to refactor their code until it does the absolute most with the absolute least."
I wholeheartedly agree. I am a huge fan of tiny software that gets it's job done efficiently, and without bloat. Standalone exe's rock. +digg - Sirocco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Back in the DOS days, it was easy to come across high profile apps that were less than 100k in size. Now, by the time you've static linked a single DLL you're over that :(
- smackfu, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3I'd rather they spend time on features than on code size.
- dragulaaeop, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3...yes, it can.
For those who have not seen or played .kkrieger, I suggest you go here http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger.html download it and play it. It is 65k FPS that has amazing graphics.
It is still pretty buggy and doesn't like some nVidia cards (you will know if it doesn't like yours if the game is very dark, like Doom III dark). Seriously, if game developers used this method for coding their games then image how much you could fit on standard cd? The main drawback is that it requires quite a bit more cpu power to run smoothly.
Just try it out if you have not already. - chrismear, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I can appreciate the hacker coolness of small executables, but how does a big executable actually affect you day-to-day? All this complaining about bloatware is missing the point -- bloatware is software that has too many features and is bady designed from the user's perspective, not necessarily software that simply has a large filesize.
- TheNik, on 10/12/2007, -4/+0BitSpirit FTW. :/
- Huffster, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Come on! You young whipper snappers were'nt around when we PAID to play arcade games that were in only 4K or less. I say great software can live in 130k with flying colors.
Example: Asteroids 4K for an arcade machine game:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids
Want bloatfree software? Learn assembly programming. Smallest programs, fastest execution. - MooseFruit, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I wholeheartedly agree with small EXEs, tight code.
I asked a product manager one time why their software was so bloated and getting worse. His answer? I would rather add features than worry about code efficiency. Features are what sell. - jarsonic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@joel2600: What features are you referring to? I'm curious. :)
- starmanjones, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0>We need to see more programs like Utorrent, programs that are not 'bloatware'.
why? i'm not sure i have bloatware. i'm not sure what exactly constitutes as bloatware. - kalphegor, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0.kkrieger. crashes at loading :(
- mgreenwald, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0uTorrent FTW!!!
- BinaryJay, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I can't do it because in the real world applications of any real business complexity would take orders of magnitude longer to piece together without the "bloat" reusable libraries.
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Why does modern software have a ridiculously large footprint?
Because modern hardware supports it, and it's cheaper and faster. Sure, you can write an amazing 14k app in assembly, but you can write the same app in 1/3rd the time using a higher level language and a couple more meg. And time is money. - gol706, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Amen, I collect small programs that don't need an installer to run and carry it in my computer cd case. Never know when somethign random will come in handy. Only wish I were better at C++ to write compact code like that.
- lordsandwich, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10There's something slightly ironic about praising a lean, tightly-coded application that allows you to clog your broadband connection and HDD with terabytes of warez and pr0n.
Not that I'm complaining. - spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I love slimware! The best and most versitile media player for windows is Foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org). And let's not forget the awesome 64k and 4k intros from the demoscene! http://www.hornet.org
- IngisKahn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Great client; can't peak at the code thou...
- Duelus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Gotta think of flash too, a lot of great software is written in small flash files.
- detayls, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6First ever post.
When I worked at MicroPro in 1981, the team was asked to port WordStar from 8080 CP/M to MSDOS. The first incarnation was made on a 48kb PC of which 16kb was for DOS and the remaining 32kb was for WordStar.
We spit this HUGE space into 16kb for document and 16kb for code, which was around 4kb resident and 16kb overlays. Later we went completely nuts and used the "medium" memory model, which allowed WordStar for PC jr to be a full .exe file and use 64kb for WordStar code, 64kb for data and 64kb for menus, messages and so forth.
Even more cool was that you could load WordStar and then ---remove the system disk-- and substitute that floppy with a data floppy, since no overlays were needed.
Eeeehhh!!! When I were a lad, we had real computers...... Kids today.... - wilf_brim, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I, too, am a uTorrent convert. I was having troubles with Azureus, and saw a Digg on uTorrent 1.3 release. I haven't even considered going back. Yes, you do get some more features in larger clients, but I'll take 10% fewer features for a tiny client. It does everything I need it to do.
And I love the peers tab with the little flags, so I can see where my packets are going. Shout out to my homies in the Netherlands.. (pours 40 packets onto the ground in salute). - troublemaker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0detayls: Tell me about it. I started programming on the Sinclair ZX81, which had 1 kilobyte of RAM. That's 1024 bytes, folks. Take a couple of messages in this thread, and you've exceeed the available memory on the ZX81.
130 kB? Pfff! Luxury! - inkswamp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm not sure I can relate to this obsession with small apps. Here's the deal. When you look at the size of yesterday's apps and the typical available hard drive/storage space compared to today's app sizes and typical available hard drive/storage space, today's "bloated" apps actually occupy a smaller percentage of that space. You can't compare yesterday's and today's apps byte-for-byte when things change as rapidly as they do. The really logical conclusion is that applications have become more economical (relatively) in terms of space despite increasing in actual size.
That's not to say there isn't bloatware out there but just because app sizes increase doesn't mean it's all bloat. - frizzipazzi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0the softeware that will replace acrobat reader: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php foxit reader, 2 mb for the same stuff of acrobat!
- chandler, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0lousy firewall support no digg
- dognose, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0How can it be great, it doesn't work on my machine.
- phrosty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0it's not really 130KiB, the exe is compressed.
in any case- there are better ways of programming. you can certainly use the old ways and get a very compact binary, but that is rarely worth the much higher cost in development time. - RWVolkl158, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"@joel2600: you should try µTorrent again -- I felt the same way you did until I noticed the latest version practically mirrors Azureus for features!"
Ditto... uTorrent might not have been able to compete at the very beginning, but now it's VERY comprable to Azureus while being much more memory efficient. - dognose, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1It took me over a meg of downloading webpages to find that it doesn't work on linux. how do you call that small?
- effigy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I suggest using Purebasic http://www.purebasic.com You can write full featured apps with very small footprints (Even under 20KB)
- stoanhart, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6For all those saying this is a waste of time - I beg to differ.
I just switched to this client, and it's like night and day. Just to clarify, my system is not old. A64 3200+ OC'd to 2.55Ghz and 1GB RAM.
Azureus didn't take too long to load, but it interfered with other programs functioning. After running for a few days, it would take over 300MB of RAM! WTF? I don't care if I have a gig - that's just too much. I would get errors that my page file is running out - my page file is 1.5 GB! When downloading torrents, my CPU usage would jump around in the 5-15 percent range.
Enter uTorrent. Double click on the exe (standalone rocks), and a near carbon-copy interface of Azureus shows up. It has a built in RSS reader, it presents all the same information in the same manner, and it provides advanced options to allow it to run here on my university network (report a fake IP to get arround the proxies). Memory usage after three days? 4.5MB vs 300 for Azureus. CPU usage when downloading? 0-1% vs 5-15%.
It matters. I don't care how fast your system is and how cheap and expendable memory is - it matters. Java is a god-awful language for general pupose applications like a torrent client. I can't believe they focus on it so much in school. Who would ever choose Java for a serious project? - tomkroening, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Frizzipazzi:
You took the words out of my mouth! Foxit Reader is a perfect example of software done right. The install for Acrobat standard is 160MB! I can't imagine what kind of data is actually there.
As a whole I think we have gone from being overly conservative (like leaving off the first two digits of the year to save memory) to being way to liberal with our CPU/Memory/Disk resources. It's time to tighten up the belt.. Keep things simple, fast, and small. To me, the size of the app, how much memory it uses, and the launch speed are sometimes just as important as the feature set.
I've developed in a variety of different environments and so far I'm sticking with Win32API. .NET usually means bloatware - especially when bundled with the framework. Java is also a runtime language that needs the JRE which is big and slow as well. I was using dephi to create my native apps but I found that my 550k delphi app is only 20k using the API.
inkswamp:
You are thinking like PC manufacturers. They love bloatware because it makes you want to buy new machines to run it faster. Having more storage space is supposed to mean that we CAN store more, rather than store the same amount of files that are just bigger.
I hate to generalize, but when you are concerned with the file size, memory usage, and speed at which your application launches/runs -- you usually end up with a much better product because you take the same kind of pride and care in developing the rest of it.
(SIDE NOTE)
What the heck is happening to OSX binaries? They are already so big, what will the intel code do for them? I havn't made an OSX app since projectBuilder so maybe XCode has changed some things... - CaughtThinking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1utorrent is cute, but if size is a goal, it's effort is wasted. I haven't filled up (or even come remotely close to filling up a harddrive in at least a decade. Same goes for day to day applications in any OS. the only thing that tasks my computer are computer games.
So 6 megs, vs. 100K, cute, but I don't care. If that were 6 gigs vs. 100megs, then I want, but not on the < 10 megs scale. - richardtallent, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Code "bloat" isn't only about write speed. Managed code also does a bang-up job at preventing certain common security issues (including, but not limited to, buffer overflows).
As an always-on server, a BitTorrent application, even more than a web browser or email app, is a sitting duck for potential remote attacks. I'm happy to trade a layer of .NET or Java runtime "bloat" any day of the week, as I don't trust individual C/C++ programmers to write perfectly secure code. - noseeme, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I think bloatware only entails that it has too much code that is useless.
Torrent programs like Azureus, or even the official bit torrent client made by Bram Cohen (commonly called "Bit Torrent Mainline") are large in comparison to muTorrent, but if you browse the precompiled source, you find that most overall megabytes of the software are useful. - Guspaz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2The file size of the binary itself is irrelevant. Memory footprint, on the other hand, is.
What would you rather have, a 130KB application that uses 100MB of memory, or a 1.3MB application that uses 10MB of memory? I'd opt for the latter.
Of course, even memory footprint is moot in light of other concerns, such as featureset, performance, etc.
Anyhow, my point is, executable size is so meaningless that I've reported this story as lame. - hiro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0uTorrent is great, since switching from Azureus I've never looked back
- ColdDimSum, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0on many architectures Forth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_programming_language) can be even smaller than traditional assembly language and offers various higher-level language features as well as a measure of portability between systems. See also PostScript and OpenFirmware for other examples.
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