Efficient Software

In an in-progress build of NetNewsWire, I turned off embedding the Swift libraries — which brings the app size down from 18.4MB to 6.9MB. Which is a huge saving, and I’m so glad we can do this now.

It reminds me of a thing I’ve been thinking about. I don’t have anything super well-put-together — just some provisional thoughts.

It seems to me that software uses electricity, and electricity use should be minimized for the health of the climate. Right? The larger the download, the more electricity it takes to download it.

And, of course, in general, the more efficient an app is, the less electricity it uses. It’s not like making NetNewsWire smaller and more efficient will change the planet — but if every app maker were to do better, it might help?

I’ll put it another way: I used to work on performance because people like apps that feel fast. (I sure do. I’m a speed junkie.) I still do that — but now I also think in terms of efficiency (which helps with performance), because I also think about the environmental cost of my software.

But, were I to bet, I’d put money on websites being the biggest-by-far abusers of electricity. Page sizes, and the amount of JavaScript that goes into them, has ballooned. It’s absolutely nuts.

(This is one of the reasons I favor static rendering. Pages are rendered once instead of on-demand — it seems obvious that this is most likely way more efficient. But if you’re still using a ton of JavaScript, maybe not.)

Should we be thinking green as we’re programming? Is it pointless? I hope it’s not — and I think we should be thinking green with everything we do, including programming.

And, along the way, we might find we make software and websites (especially) that people like better, since they’re faster and lighter.