In 2025 this winge can finally die. Die hard.

The size of software is such a rallying point for malcontents & grumblers. Endless belly-aching, back in my day software was all fast and hand coded in assembly, no, binary, by real men/women.

Load times can be a bit bad, and yes 400MB app sizes so kind of suck but honestly, it'll swap out fine and if you have an even passible modern SSD, it'll swap right back in fine too in crazy fast speeds. In principle it's unpleasant, in practice, for most people this is not a real impact. But oh how it attracts aggression and disdain.

The point about security is interesting because the stakes are so high. And oh my, we do see some epic disasters. What was the npm one with cyrptocoin wallets being drained recently? But you know? In general the number of occurences have been fantastically stunningly low; it's rarely an issue. There's some log4j shit where longstanding legacy unmaintained apps have some horrific vulnerability that no one is around to import the fix for. But generally? Most exploits are dealt with with amazing haste these days, at much shorter intervals than most dev's do uodates, such that most teams likely won't see impact. There's incredibly good tooling available to report dependencies & automatedly offer patches. The stakes are high but our defenses are astoundingly modern capable & fast acting. We are vulnerable, absolutely, but in practice where we are is amazing.

The security footing I think is hella legit as a plea for lean software. Far more so than so many other persistent endless grumbles. I'm so weary that so many folks have a common place to get together and bellyache & moan, endlessly, again and again, about how bad software is, and how awful things are, when it's not. Shit is amazing. Our ability to stitch great shit together is amazing and having some extra code or parallel utility functions coded in just isn't really a great offense.

Software has plenty of bad architectures underneath the surface, that make it low performance and bad. There's real hard problems about doing minimal amount of work when things change, figuring out what work to do, understanding what data structures and algorithms are helping and hurting. I want software dissenters, I want anger, but it feels like such low grade feed stock complaints that focus on such low & mostly-irrelevant factors that they can easily get together & breed disdain over.

So, here we are in 2024, and this security stance seems like a super legit if improbable thing to be terrified about, an actual forcing function to care about the growth of software under layers. If only we had some kind of secure maybe cross-language hopefully capabilities-based sandboxed system for running code that we could use to run libraries safely in... Aoj wait, we do, it's called wasm, and wasi just shipped preview 2 with component-model, so we can make this happen. I'm excited that we can progress past this reason for conservative Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, by encapsulating the problem and containing it, without having to undergo some radical revolution where we completely remake software development in some undefined safe secure mysterious way where everyone starts all using the same code which we all agree is the exactly right code & nothing else is possible. People love to get together & feel smug that they have been in touch with the better halcyon universe where everything is great & only as it should have been, but no one has offered even the remotest suggestiom of how we get there. MS tried with years of .NET but even they had to constantly reinvent what batteries included meant. Who else will do better, make only perfect decisions, such that no one else ever need touch or address the topic again? This longong for some higher authority to make code perfect & simple as can be flies in the face of what should be exciting & compelling & powerful about the coding world to me; it's messiness brings amazing glory & possibility & we thresh towards better slowly & chaotically. What happens is amazing & I'm so tired of the positive of this world having no outlet, no rallying points, while the people who want to trash software can cand together so regularly so easily & so frequently. It's unfair that software conservatism has as much appeal as it does, and wasm stands to cut this reality-bias off at the kneecaps, thank the stars.