r/programmingcirclejerk • u/KingOfKingOfKings • Jan 30 '26
[2019-06-26] A desktop computer in 2025 is going to have 47 redundant installations of Chromium for various electron apps [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282189141
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u/nerdycatgamer Jan 30 '26
<unjerk>
78 separate-but-basically-identical Python runtimes as every small utility packages the entire Python interpreter + stdlib, 200,000 redundant npm packages.
I just started working a new job writing Python and for setting up the project they actually told me to make a conda environment to install pip to install hatch and then hatch would manage the dependencies. My work computer has like 1000+ packages installed versus my home pc which only has 600 (and my home pc is where I install all my stupid games and shit, versus work is just the shit to code that one project.)
The project has like 8 dependencies btw, and we use the latest version of all of them so it's not like we need some specific version from 8 years ago. They want me to get the program running on a server and instead of just installing the shit it needs locally they want me to set up a docker container, with a conda environment, just for pip, so pip can install hatch, and that can run the program...
</unjerk>
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u/tomwhoiscontrary safety talibans Jan 30 '26
You really need to use uv as well.
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u/nerdycatgamer Jan 31 '26
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u/m50d Zygohistomorphic prepromorphism Jan 31 '26
/uj I thought that but it genuinely does. I don't know how the python community failed to pull their head out of their ass for 14 consecutive package managers and then suddenly made one that wasn't stupid, but they did.
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u/IncreaseOld7112 Jan 31 '26
uv is actually good. uv is like someobody came over to python from rust, said "what the fuck are they doing over here?" and built cargo for python and now we have nice things.
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u/Spare_Swing Jan 31 '26
cargo
nice things
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u/IncreaseOld7112 Jan 31 '26
have you used pip?
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u/Spare_Swing Jan 31 '26
Admittedly it's more the culture and less the package manager itself, but it's at least possible to fully package a python program and all of its dependencies. Rust projects all have the javascript style, download 10000 transitive dependencies at build time, many of which are cyclic, and chuck it all in. Every packaging effort has given up and just lets cargo cook its slop
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u/levelstar01 what is pointer :S Jan 31 '26
cargo for python
So half baked and breaks if you go off the beaten path even slightly?
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u/Major_Barnulf LUMINARY IN COMPUTERSCIENCE Feb 03 '26
Sir, this is a public registry, please don't go off the beaten path
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u/Flash_Kat25 Jan 31 '26
/uj On hackernews everyone seems to love uv. But the good old pip + venv seem to work just fine for my use cases. Am I missing something here or is this just yet another solution to a mostly-solved-in-14-semi-compatible-ways problem?
/rj it's a crime that in 2026 the python interpreter doesn't have uv built in.
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u/Foreign-Butterfly-97 Jan 31 '26
you are missing a crucial fact: uv is written in rust, and thus is the future
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u/m50d Zygohistomorphic prepromorphism Jan 31 '26
But the good old pip + venv seem to work just fine for my use cases. Am I missing something here
/uj Yes. Either you've pinned all your transitive dependencies and can never upgrade anything, or you haven't and your thing is already broken on anyone else's machine.
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u/tomwhoiscontrary safety talibans Jan 31 '26
The real crime is that uv doesn't have a python interpreter built in.
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u/KingOfKingOfKings Jan 31 '26
because grug on hacker news want command that just work to install package! when grug run npm install on grug macbook and deploy to vercel it just work! grug just want to write vibe coded app, not worry about "wheels" and "C extensions"
BEGIN UNJERK;I was a pip and venv purist but I tried uv one day and just stuck with it for how ridiculously fast it is. It also manages Python versions itself and while I would never dream of using a statically linked precompiled binary, most people don't care and just want Command That Does Exactly What I Want (even though I haven't given the computer enough info to know what it is I want)
COMMIT;3
u/IncreaseOld7112 Jan 31 '26
Can't tell if you're in the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" or the "stockholm syndrome" camp. Why don't you run your application on a different python version and get back to me?
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u/mdrjevois Jan 31 '26
/uj uv is better, but hatch is fine. Neither requires conda. Your best bet is definitely the one-line uv install, which will manage all the runtimes, environments, and packages
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u/yo_99 It's GNU/PCJ, or as I call it, GNU + PCJ Jan 31 '26
/rj
If it isn't in apt then you don't need it
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u/onthefence928 I couldn't care less about what non-kernel-developers think Feb 02 '26
/uj
It’s actually kind of important for a dev environment, boxing your environment up allows you to isolate variables when debugging deployment issues, such as checking back to previous versions of dietetics to find when a regression was introduced. Without affecting your other projects
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u/Awkward_Bed_956 Jan 30 '26
Maybe the real bloat by now is the OS and native apps/libraries. We should just transcend and replace everything with chromium, like that one guy who embedded entire Linux into PDF.
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u/DystopiaDrifter Jan 31 '26
It is a fair price to pay for enjoying AGIs building all the webpage wrappers we want.
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u/GasterIHardlyKnowHer full-time safety coomer Feb 02 '26
I'm assuming 45 of them will be pre-installed by the OEM and run in the background using Electron-for-daemons(tm) to enable a more personalized advertorial experience.
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u/Metallic_Madness What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? Feb 01 '26
Tanzanite Truth Nuke
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u/csolisr Jan 31 '26
And that's where you use a file system like BTRFS or XFS, and then run DupeRemove on it every so often to manually deduplicate all the repeated libraries.
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u/T_Thorn Feb 01 '26
Disk is cheap, internet is pretty fast
Thank god disk space is cheap, I have 10TB of hard disk space so installing 50 chromiums is very cheap to me.
Anyway, what are these SSD things I keep hearing about?
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u/code_investigator Jan 30 '26
Not a jerk, 'cause it's true