Meta makes more money than god and there's over a billion WhatsApp users. It's not like this thing is Blender or a AAA game, it's a chat frontend. Maintaining it has to be a rounding error in the budget.
I wonder if they avoided that so they could use Electron and target MacOS / Linux too
We often hear stories about the speed of development and the issues of maintaining native apps, and then there are these rewrites every few years. Don't they waste more resources vs. creating / fixing the gaps in the native app? And this isn't somes quick startup prototype app that can flop and the effort would be wasted
Yet, I really don't understand why WhatsApp would need app especially with the state mentioned here (which is a basic wrapper)
There are no calls in the web app, but modern web stack is more than enough to provide all the real functionality needed for it.
dangus•1h ago
Must be a tiny percentage, which is why this version is now a basic web wrapper now.
Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.”
Many applications just use a lot if it’s available.
RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.
Bolwin•1h ago
Dylan16807•1h ago
> Many applications just use a lot if it’s available.
Some of that memory isn't going to be touched again, and will eventually be moved to swap, but it still pushed things out of RAM to be there and is a troublemaker.
The rest of that memory will be needed again, so if it gets swapped out it'll lag badly when you switch back to the program.
Either way 99% of programs are not doing any kind of intelligent use of spare memory. If you see them doing something that looks wasteful, that's because they're being wasteful.
The one thing to remember is that at the OS level, disk cache pretty much qualifies as free memory. But that's unrelated to this issue.
1over137•1h ago
I guess this modern attitude is how we are where we are.
RAM is absolutely a scarce precious resource that we optimize for. At least we used to, and some of us still do.
snthpy•1h ago
tolciho•39m ago
Except when something really does need more RAM, and fails. LLVM for example having, somehow, become a bit chonky and now fails to compile on 32-bit OpenBSD systems because it wants more memory than is available. Less bloated software of course does not suffer from this problem, and continues to run on still functional 32-bit systems.
> Many applications just use a lot if it’s available.
Xorg is using 92M, irssi 21M (bloated, but I've been lazy about finding something leaner), xenodm 12M. That's the top three. Oh, Windows? Yeah. About that. Best you can hope for is not to catch too much of the splatter. (What passes for Mac OS X these days also seems fairly dismal.)
> RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.
Paperclips were hung on the rack doors to make it easier to poke the wee little red reset button when some poorly written software went all gibblesquik (as poorly written software is wont to do) and the OOM killer could not cope and, whelp, reset time. Elsewhere, RAM is explicitly rationed—perhaps certain aspects of timesharing have been somewhat forgotten in this benighted era of bloat?—and malloc will return NULL, something certain programmers often fail to check for, which is generally followed by the kernel taking the error-ridden code out back and shooting it.
eviks•31m ago
Also, even in theory the issue isn't only with "wouldn't function", but "would function slower due to eg disk swaps / cause other apps to function slower".
vrighter•31m ago
It most certainly is. My old pc ran on 8MB of ram. Modern ones need 16GB for a comfortable experience. They do not do much more than I needed back then. I think it's reasonable to expect a simple chat app to not take up 128 times as much memory as my entire PC had when I was young.