Comment by eviks

That's embarrassing.

Not your app, it rocks.

Microsoft. It's like some decision-maker thinks it's OK to waste memory as long as it's someone (everyone) elses' memory, but it really adds up if you know anything about scale.

But what they're also doing is a non-businesslike under-utilization of their own resources.

Which is disgraceful in itself on top of that.

They're supposed to have much better AI than average and nobody even bothered to ask ChatGPT why in the world weather should take more than kilobytes?

And if their AI can't do it autonomously in under a megabyte it should be able to give a plausible explanation why not by now, and at least it would be orders of magnitude better than a gigabyte.

I assume yours went smoothly as prompted and it surely is an excellent example :)

Not trying to excuse the Windows app's memory usage, but these are vastly different apps. Your app is nice, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't have anywhere near the same number of features as the default weather app. In some ways that's a pro for the Windows weather app (animated radar, easy to pan around in the radar view, extra map modes, lots of graphical elements to the presentation), in some ways yours is better (ad-free, for example).

Don't get me wrong, I imagine one could get close to the same featureset while using <600+ MB of RAM, but an app that just shows a table of numbers and a static PNG for a radar isn't really the same.

FWIW, while your compiled binary is 233kB, when its running its using 2.5-4.5MB.

Apple weather is fully native from what I understand. I suspect the 250MB comes from the video backgrounds they play. Arguably that would be a reasonable thing to sacrifice on low memory systems, you'd barely notice.

1MB is about the lowest memory usage you can get on Windows 7, because of reasonable tradeoffs made in the operating system to things like buffer and stack sizes. The OS creates a few threads for you, those threads have stacks and they didn't optimize the allocation size of those stacks - they used a currently reasonable default.

What else might that weather app be doing to justify the memory footprint? MS might suck at memory efficiency, but you can't claim they'd ever miss an opportunity to monetize their users. How can a weather app make MS money? MS has asked themselves this, so maybe we should too.

I think you guys on HN can be a bit out of touch maybe? On my linux machine (measured with tux-manager):

  nautilus                            177 MB
  kitty                               150 MB
  alacritty                           107 MB
  mpv --idle --force-window           160 MB
  winit empty window + OpenGL context 100 MB
  tux-manager                         69  MB
  hexchat                             55  MB
  gnome-terminal                      47  MB
  st                                  12  MB
  xterm                               12  MB

All these apps are what you would consider native, good apps. Written with Qt, GTK, some in low level langs like C\C++, Rust as well. There is of course different ways to measure the usage and maybe some more testing needs to be done, but stuff like 1-10 MB seems completely unrealistic. I think any empty Qt/GTK app eats 40 MB at least. Only thing that even gets close is st at 12 MB. And mind you it's a terminal (which is 1000x simpler than any modern GUI app, doesn't load any assets etc) and it doesn't even use any GPU accel (which itself seem to add a lot of baseline cost).

Honestly I was a bit surprised myself. I have a Rust winit + ash vulkan hardcoded triangle demo app and it eats 86 MB (the binary itself is 5.5 MB). I would love to know, if anyone could explain why GPU accel seems to eat up so much RAM. Like yeah, there are a bunch of images that live on swapchain, but they should all be in VRAM. Outside of that I don't see what would require MBs worth of overhead.

10 MB is not too bad for a GUI app. If the app is full screen, display is FullHD and has 8 bit depth, that's almost 8 MB memory for the back buffer alone. Enable HDR and pixels become 8 bytes RGBA16_Float instead of 4 bytes BGRA8_Unorm, twice as much memory.

How much money are these companies going to make by reducing their weather app to 1MB, or 10MB? How much is it going to cost them to get there?

The world doesn't run on personal aesthetics, when nobody is willing to pay for them.

`ansiweather` needs like ~6.28 MiB (measured with `/usr/bin/time -l` on OS X), but it's a bash script that invokes cURL, so there's certainly various overheads there too.

One probably could get this down way below ~1 MiB with a properly tuned straight executable written in C (best not to use any of the "modern" stuff like Rust and Go, their default binary sizes for outputting "Hello, world!\n" are already extreme :-) )

By default anything needs at least 532480 bytes RSS on OSX (I tested it with the most minimal C hello world), so that's a threshold one probably can't beat on OS X at least. We probably could kill that value on Amiga OS with the exact same functionality. :-)

The KDE Plasma weather app takes in maximum 1MB.

I mean, you're getting dumped on for this, but it seems about right?

For an extreme example:

    curl https://wttr.in/

Inside of a conky widget would do the trick, I think.

https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky/wiki/Lua:-Shell-Integra...

Unrelated, but it reminds me of this C64 demo [1] I posted earlier this week: the whole thing in 17.8 KB.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205592

Even 1MB is too much. I expect a modern weather app to be <20K.