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0 pointsrty321y ago0 comments

Agree. "Single executable" combined with "less than 40mb" is just looking for trouble for what the author is trying to do. If you want to do win32, go ahead and give up styling. Otherwise, make compromises. I think many of these are excellent choices chosen by many programs that I use, it's the author's stringent requirements and unrealistic expectations that is holding back.

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beagle31y ago

This comment makes me feel like I live on a different planet.

In 1999, I built a completely custom Win32 GUI for a (brandable) chat application - that was the product the company I worked for was selling.

Pure C and C++. It was a 32-bit app, not 64 bits. And we felt bad for it being 250KB single executable (skin included in resource section) and not “150KB or less” as was our initial target. But making it accessible and fully skinnable/themable/l10n/i18n did add quite a bit which we hadn’t realized when thinking 150KB was realistic. But it’s not like we resorted to any crazy tricks; that was just the stripped linker output.

It was still a reasonable download at the dominant dial up internet at the time (28.8Kbps IIRC)

Sure, modern tools add a lot of cruft that you’d have to work hard to reduce, but 40MB. Oh man.

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abareplace1y ago

My app is around 500 KB (not megabytes) and it supports dark mode (see https://www.abareplace.com/). So this is definitely possible without using Electron or bloated GUI libraries.

alok-g1y ago

Winamp comes to mind as a counter example.

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