Ask HN: Why do maintainers optimize for small binaries? 2 by nikisweeting | 6 comments on Hacker News. Just to be clear, I'm not talking about GUI apps or websites, those are separate conversations (cough cough 350mb Electron apps and 10mb Webpack bundles). I'm talking specifically about CLI tools, webservers, and other tools distributed as static binaries or via package managers. What's the reasoning for so many package maintainers optimizing for <5mb binaries at the expense of usability? It seems like when >90% of hosts are running on 2008+ hardware with SSDs or even moderately fast HDDs, loading time and storage space are not major issues below the 30~50mb mark. A recent example from HN: https://ift.tt/2P8ddtC