That particular article for me sat in between satire and seriousness, but it was still a fun read.

(21-02-2025, 04:41 PM)ckester Wrote: Is the trend to rewrite so many utilities ... minimalism, or of bloat?

As with most things, I guess it depends what people mean by minimalism and bloat. For me minimalism is that when I look at a process tree I'm able to know everything that's in there. But it also means for me not having to pass through hoops and juggle 5 balls to be able to get the thing running, I'd rather have a solid straightforward solution.

That also doesn't mean I dismiss trying new stuff, on the contrary. There are a few of the new utilities I enjoy very much like jq, fzf, ripgrep.

(21-02-2025, 04:41 PM)ckester Wrote: Any time I look at the git repository for some tempting project and see references to cargo, I say no thank you.

(21-02-2025, 04:41 PM)ckester Wrote: preferably less than a megabyte after stripping (less than 500K even better)?

I have a similar issue with projects that have gigantic build systems, or where the final binary is 100+MB. That's just too much of a bubble where the devs live in a world of fast fiber internet and laptops-of-the-year. That's just not the case in most places, it's hindering the adoption of such tool, and pushing these tools in a direction where only the people that can install them can actually contribute and propose ideas on how to improve them.

Is that "bloat"? I'm not sure, I think it depends how many other tools you already have on your system that depends on that build environment. But if you're compiling a single binary and it requires you to pull 1GB of dependencies and build system, I'd say in that case that size can be part of "bloat" too.

I'm also interested in other's opinions.