I like that this story references the #deleteUber tag on Twitter because it helps organize the timeline of events going on at Uber. There was another twitter thread on here recently about the chaotic and disastrous (though successful) Swift rewrite they did which happened during the same time frame. twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442… During those time frames is also when all of the execs were quitting or being fired, along with their internal harassment problems. It feels like Uber has really succeeded in spite of itself.

There are limits based on the size of the binary that apple will allow on the app store. In addition, here's a really interesting story about how uber had to fight to downsize the app cause they realized that staying under the cellular data limit made people able to download the app when they were on the go: twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442…

Complementary: This thread on Uber's transition to Swift that almost broke them twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442… Includes, among other things: forcing Apple to increase cellular download limits, 45 seconds for letters to appear in XCode, 12 seconds to call main, rewriting the linker and so on.

Also, this was an entertaining retrospective recently posted: mobile.twitter.com/stantwinb/status/133…... I can’t seem to find the old link, but I’m pretty sure it was on hacker news and somebody posted a nice collation of the posts.

There's apparently a bananas crunch/backstory to this, where they committed to Swift before realizing they would hit its limits, and had to come up with a bunch of this optimization madness on the fly. I guess this is the cleaned up version and the more final, stable optimizations for the company blog: twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442…

Here's a Twitter thread about the same story, that dives a bit more into the internal politics -- twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442…

nailed it: twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442…

Businesses may be not constrained with the link times, but they for sure are worried with growing executable sizes. And large dev teams rarely reduce the code size, they just keep adding layers and layers of code as the time goes, eventually running beyond the permissible app size on the appstore. Can it solve such growth problem? Many large companies will be "sold" on this idea instantly twitter.com/stantwinb/status/1336890442…

The experience from a few years ago: "Then we hit a wall with the dynamic linker. At the time you could only link Swift libraries dynamically. Unfortunately the linker executed in polynomial time so Apple’s recommend maximum number of libraries in a single binary was 6. We had 92 and counting. As a result It took 8-12 seconds after tapping the app icon before main was even called. Our shinny new app was slower than the old clunky one. Then the binary size problem hit." - twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442…

mobile.twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/133…... It's way more complex than it seems

> “biggest engineering disaster” I just supposed that this was a story about Uber Elevate ElectricVTOL (eCRM) design.[0,1] [0] twitter.com/TheWoracle/status/995107989… [1] github.com/OpenVSP/OpenVSP/tree/main/ex…...

twitter.com/ZacSweers/status/1337112019…... (disclaimer: this is me)