78 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
78 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
# Bloat
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Bloat is a very wide term that in the context of [software](software.md) and technology means extreme growth in terms of source code size, complexity, number of [dependencies](dependency.md), [redundancy](redundancy.md), unnecessary or useless features (e.g. [feature creep](feature_creep.md)) and resource usage, all of which lead to inefficient, badly designed technology with bugs and [security](security.md) vulnerabilities, as well as **loss of [freedom](free_software.md)**, waste of human effort and great obscurity and ugliness. Bloat is extremely bad and one of the greatest technological issues of today. Creating bloat is bad engineering at it worst and unfortunately it is what's absolutely taking over all technology nowadays, mostly due to [capitalism](capitalism.md), commercialization, consumerism and incompetent people trying to take on jobs they are in no way qualified to do.
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[LRS](lrs.md), [suckless](suckless.md) and some others rather small groups are trying to address the issue and write software that is good, minimal, safe, efficient and well functioning. Nevertheless our numbers are very small and in this endeavor we are basically standing against the whole world and the most powerful tech corporations.
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One of a very frequent questions you may hear a noob ask is **"How can bloat limit software freedom if such software has a [free](free_software.md) license?"** Bloat [de-facto](de_facto.md) limits some of the four essential freedoms (to use, study, modify and share) required for a software to be free. A free license grants these freedoms legally, but if some of those freedoms are subsequently limited by other circumstances, the software becomes effectively less free. It is important to realize that **complexity itself goes against freedom** because a more complex system will inevitably reduce the number of people being able to execute freedoms such as modifying the software (the number of programmers being able to understand and modify a trivial program is much greater than the number of programmers being able to understand and modify a highly complex million [LOC](loc.md) program). As the number of people being able to execute the basic freedom drops, we're approaching the scenario in which the software is de-facto controlled by a small number of people who can (e.g. due to the cost) effectively study, modify and maintain the program -- and a program that is controlled by a small group of people (e.g. a corporation) is by definition [proprietary](proprietary.md). If there is a web browser that has a free license but you, a lone programmer, can't afford to study it, modify it significantly and maintain it, and your friends aren't able to do that either, when the only one who can practically do this is the developer of the browser himself and perhaps a few other rich corporations that can pay dozens of full time programmers, then such browser cannot be considered free as it won't be shaped to benefit you, the user, but rather the developer, a corporation.
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## Typical Bloat
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The following is a list of software usually considered a good, typical example of bloat. However keep in mind that bloat is a relative term, for example [vim](vim.md) can be seen as a minimalist suckless editor when compared to mainstream software ([IDEs](ide.md)), but at the same time it's pretty bloated when compared to strictly [suckless](suckless.md) programs.
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- [Web](web.md) since the onset of "web 2.0" has been steadily becoming more and more bloated with things such as Adobe Flash and [JavaScript](javascript.md) (and billions of its web frameworks). By today the situation about web bloat is reaching almost unbearable levels, especially in [modern](modern.md) sites such as [YouTube](youtube.md). For a great read see [The Website Obesity Crisis](https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm).
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- Ads, [spyware](spyware.md), [DRM](drm.md), anti-cheats, anti-viruses, anti-sharing, anti-repair and other anti-user "features" are bloat.
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- Desktop environments such as [KDE](kde.md) and [GNOME](gnome.md). The concept of a [desktop environment](de.md) itself is often considered bloat.
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- [Windows](windows.md): one of the best examples of how software should NOT be done.
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- [Blender](blender.md): quite useful [FOSS](foss.md) 3D editor which however integrates things like a whole video editor, game engine, several renderers, scripting language with text editor and so on.
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- [CMake](cmake.md): gigantic build system that currently sits on top of a sandwich of other build systems.
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- [Electron](electron.md): [GUI](gui.md) [framework](framework.md) infamous for its huge resource consumption.
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- [Systemd](systemd.md): Huge anti-[unix](unix_philosophy.md) do-it-all system taking over [GNU](gnu.md)/[Linux](linux.md).
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- [Virtual machines](vm.md)/environments/sandboxes, big abstraction sandwiches (e.g. program running in an interpreter running in a sandbox inside web browser that's running in a virtual machine that's running on an operating system).
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- [Firefox](firefox.md), [Chromium](chromium.md) and other mainstream web browsers.
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- [Java](java.md), [Python](python.md) and similar languages.
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- [IDEs](ide.md) such as [VSCode](vscode.md) or [NetBeans](netbeans.md).
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- Big [game engines](game_engine.md) such as [Unreal](unreal_engine.md), [Unity](unity.md) or [Godot](godot.md).
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- Practically all commercial [games](games.md) made in the [21st century](21st_century.md) such as [World of Warcraft](wow.md), Call of Duty etc.
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- [Neural networks](neural_network.md) aka "AI".
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## Small Bloat
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Besides the typical big programs that even normies admit are bloated there exists also a smaller bloat which many people don't see as such but which is nevertheless considered unnecessarily complex by some experts and/or idealists and/or hardcore minimalists, including [us](lrs.md).
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Small bloat is a subject of popular [jokes](joke.md) such as "OMG he uses a unicode fonts -- BLOAT!!!". These are good jokes, it's nice to make fun out of one's own idealism. But watch out, this doesn't mean small bloat is only a joke concept at all, it plays an important role in designing good technology. When we identify something as *small bloat*, we don't necessarily have to completely avoid and reject that concept, we may just try to for example make it optional. In context of today's PCs using a Unicode font is not really an issue for performance, memory consumption or anything else, but we should keep in mind it may not be so on much weaker computers or for example post-[collapse](collapse.md) computers, so we should try to design systems that don't [depend](depend.md) on Unicode.
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Small bloat includes for example:
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- [floating point](float.md) (complex standard with design issues, requires special hardware for acceleration, [fixed point](fixed_point.md) is better)
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- config files (and other unnecessary file I/O that requires a file I/O library, not all computers have file systems, configs should be part of source code)
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- library [linking](linking.md) ([header only](header_only.md) libraries are better)
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- any [GPU](gpu.md), [openGL](opengl.md) (complex hardware and specifications, not all computers have complex GPUs, [software rendering](software_rendering.md) is better)
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- [Unicode](unicode.md) (big specification requiring special libraries and big fonts, [ASCII](ascii.md) is better)
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- [antialiasing](antialiasing.md) (just ignore [aliasing](aliasing.md), use low resolution textures etc.)
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- 64 bit architectures (they only exist to allow ungodly amounts of RAM, 32 bits completely suffice for any computation, many times even 16 or 8 bits are enough)
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- [proportional font](proportional_font.md) (fixed width font is better)
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- [linking](linking.md), build systems/scripts, [makefiles](make.md), directories and multiple source code files (single file, [header only](header_only.md) libraries and [single compilation unit](single_compilation_unit.md) programs are better)
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- [infix notation](infix_notation.md) ([postfix notation](postfix_notation.md) is better)
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- any [GUI](gui.md), [window managers](wm.md) (pure text mode is better)
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- [operating system](os.md) ([bare metal](bare_metal.md) is better)
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- [multithreading](multithreading.md), [parallelism](parallelism.md), [virtual memory](virtual_memory.md), ...
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- [encryption](encryption.md), [security](security.md), [memory safety](memory_safery.md) (just don't care and/or don't handle sensitive data with computers connected to the internet, don't live in a shitty society)
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- [database](database.md) software (plain files are better)
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- [C](c.md) (something in between C and [brainfuck](brainfuck.md) would be ideal, e.g. [Forth](forth.md) may come close)
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- [glibc](glibc.md), [gcc](gcc.md), [clang](clang.md) etc. (better alternatives are [tcc](tcc.md), [musl](musl.md), [uclibc](uclibc.md) etc.)
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- letter accents/diacritics (can normally be ignored in most languages that use them)
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- [jpg](jpg.md), [png](png.md), [svg](svg.md) and similar formats (e.g. [ppm](ppm.md) or [farbfeld](farbfeld.md) is better)
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- [syntax highlight](syntax_highlight.md) and just [colors](color.md) anywhere they aren't absolutely necessary
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- [html](html.md), [markdown](md.md) ([plain text](plaintext.md) is better)
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- [x86](x86.md) instruction set (e.g. [ARM](arm.md) is probably better, { Not completely sure how bloated ARM really is. ~drummyfish })
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- any non-[public-domain](public_domain.md) license (any legal burden introduced by a license is unnecessary bloat)
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- dynamic [linking](linking.md) (static linking is better)
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- [web](web.md) 1.0, [gemini](gemini.md) ([gopher](gopher.md) or [FTP](ftp.md) is better)
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- [mouse](mouse.md) (keyboard is better)
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- [TCP](tcp.md) ([UDP](udp.md) is probably better)
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- [vim](vim.md) (things like [ed](ed.md) are probably better?)
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- sound (picture is usually enough)
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- high resolution (640x480 is probably the maximum you'll ever need, lower resolution takes less RAM and makes rendering faster)
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- [true color](true_color.md) (256 colors, e.g. [332](332.md) palette, is better)
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- [GNU](gnu.md) Unix utils (things like [busybox](busybox.md) or [sbase](sbase.md) are probably better)
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- [data types](data_type.md) (untyped or single type is better, everything can be just a [number](number.md))
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- [package managers](package_manager.md) (just don't use them, install just a few programs manually, or at least make package managers as simple as possible)
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- [computers](computer.md) (pen and paper or counting with [rocks](rock.md) is better)
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- ...
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## Non-Computer Bloat
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The concept of bloat can be applied even outside the computing world, e.g. to non-computer technology, [art](art.md), [culture](culture.md), [law](law.md) etc. Here it becomes kind of synonymous with [bullshit](bullshit.md), but using the word *bloat* says we're approaching the issue as computer programmers.
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TODO: examples |