Super Mario Bros shipped in 40KB. A bare React app ships more before you write a line of your own. What did they know that we forgot?
When I say that to younger developers, they nod politely and then ask what the catch is, because in their world nothing is ever just what it says. There isn’t a catch.
There’s absolutely a catch. You wrote that code for a single piece of hardware. You hand tuned it for that one specific platform taking advantage of every trick you could find. It probably took longer to write than your website and it didn’t really matter if it wasn’t perfect.
You can’t buy a system that slow or that memory constrained anymore (spare me your weird embedded processors, you know what I mean). Move on.
I put my personal site through the "fire"fox page profiler. Get rektum.
Technical breakdown
Frontpage :
Empty cache Number of requests Type Size Transferred Time Non blocking time 2 images 10.71 kB 2.52 kB 0.54s 0.54 s 1 css 3.82 kB 1.24 kB 0.24 s 0.24 s 1 html 2.08 kB 2.40 kB 1.81 s 0.76 s Cached responses: 0 Total requests: 4 Size: 16.60 kB Transferred Size: 6.15 kB Time: 2.58 seconds Non blocking time: 1.53 secondsPage with images
Empty cache Number of requests Type Size Transferred Time Non blocking time 4 images 79.16 kB 71.65 kB 2.01 s 2.01 s 1 css 3.82 kB 1.24 kB 0.28 s 0.28 s 1 html 1.38 kB 1.70 kB 0.75 s 0.75 s Cached responses: 0 Total requests: 6 Size: 84.36 kB Transferred Size: 74.59 kB Time: 3.04 seconds Non blocking time: 3.04 secondsJS application demo
Empty cache Number of requests Type Size Transferred Time Non blocking time 6 js 43.65 kB 10.48 kB 1.58 s 1.59 s 1 css 3.83 kB 1.06 kB 0.30 s 0.30 s 2 images 0.51 kB 1.03 kB 0.50 s 0.50 s 1 html 0.39 kB 0.71 kB 0.73 s 0.73 s Cached responses: 0 Total requests: 10 Size: 48.38 kB Transferred Size: 13.28 kB Time: 3.12 seconds Non blocking time: 3.12 secondsLol. I’m not writing compiled C code for a Ricoh 5A22. What a silly comparison.
We now have more capable hardware and there are different needs and constraints for web-development.
