Technology

Ok that is an impressive number but it feels a little disingenuous. You still need to something on your machine to interpret the js code, right? Is that included in the 13k? How much storage does that take?

EDIT: Well this is by far my most negative comment here. That’s almost entertaining. I’ll share a few more of my thoughts here rather than respond to individual comments. Maybe the context will make this more palatable.

First, I expect that the js language is doing most of the work here. Which makes sense. But having a browser installed as a prerequisite is an enormous dependency.

How would that stack up against other languages? Can I build a 13k binary using C? How about C#? I think Go is maybe the most interesting because the binary is entirely self contained by default. No external dependencies aside from the OS. I don’t think this or a similar game is viable with only 13k. Which is fine! I just that I find 13k is disingenuous.

That brings up the question of whether or not we should include the OS in the storage size. I would think not. But that’s only because the OS is (usually) the least common denominator when we talk about developing software. It’s generally assumed by default. But if someone wants to compare with a game that interfaces with hardware directly, then yes, we should absolutely include the OS as a dependency.

Now that I’m giving this more thought, I suspect that the devs wrote 13k of code + assets to make the game functional. Still impressive. But the more I think about this, the more meaningless that number gets. Does pre or post compiling matter more? What if we compress the thing as tarball? There’s just too many ways to manipulate this number.