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I was generating 7-15Mb binaries out of Delphi in the late 90's (it had a similar kitchen sink approach) and it simply wasn't an issue then and it certainly isn't an issue now.

I'm actually racking my brain for a case where a 500kb vs 5Mb binary would be a deal breaker, outside of embedded stuff I can't think of much.



Just as a minor point -

One of the major blockers to clojure in android is that the lack of treeshaking/deadcode elimination makes for 10 second+ startup times in most environments.


It matters when you have to download the file over a slow network.

"The ideal size is 10-15MB globally. Idea size for an app for tier 2/3 countries (like India) is below 5MB. 500MB+ is a non-starter. At 50MB+ the conversion rates fall off dramatically."

http://time.com/3589909/internet-next-billion-mobile/


Go binaries compress well in my experience. For example, I have a Go program that compiles to an 8.2 MB binary when compiled with gc 1.4.1. With bz2 compression, which takes about half a second on my box, it can be shrunk down to 2 MB.


If Google keeps Go away from Android, as first class language, only having the Go team doing NDK related support it doesn't really matter.

I don't foresee any changes on this regard at Google IO.




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