Comment by pvaldes
1 year ago
lets be fair. It says: 35% of it does nothing -for the user-
Maybe if does something for the bank then. An app can have different tasks and not all must be related with communicating with the users. Machines need communicate with other machines, or send data, or store a database of legal texts or exception handling cases.
90% of the instruction manuals of appliances just are spent saying the same in twenty different languages that I will never use. Is this outrageous? Maybe. Maybe not
Or maybe this apps are just mining crypto in the background and sucking battery. Who knows?
the thread literally says that 35% of the app bundle is taken by "binary symbol tables". binary symbol tables is a mapping of a memory address to function and variable names. it's use is to debug an app locally. >99% users won't even know what a debugger is and just report the error once the os prompts them to. the remaining <1% of curious developers owning a mac with XCode and knowing what debugger and debugging symbols are may play with them, but without knowledge of how the source code is organized it won't be useful to them anyway. the submitted report will contain the memory addresses but won't contain the symbols, the developer will have to load them externally from the company's build server. it's literally useless to anyone for anything.
> it's literally useless to anyone for anything.
Very helpful for anyone who wants to crack or reverse engineer that app. Not sure why anybody would want to do that. But there could be people with criminal minds having some creative idea.
Not trying to say that stripping symbols is the ultimate security measure. But at least I cannot see a reason to keep them, as the parent commenter wrote. Appears as an utterly incompetent software delivery process.
(poster) I had to trim the title to fit HN submission.
I would argue it does nothing for the user, and nothing in the app given it can be trimmed with no side-effects.