Framework upon framework, abstraction upon abstraction. In pursuit of consistency and ease of development, the art of computer programming was lost and replaced with careless consumption of resources.

Yeah.

Weather.gov has an API. Hit three endpoints- one to convert lat/long to their grid system, one for current conditions, one for forecast. Box the JSON into a pretty layout. <100 lines of TCL/Tk if you want to do it the lazy way and it still takes less RAM than an Electron Hello World.

It depends how far back you go. I remember upgrading from 4MB RAM to 8MB to run Win95.

You can absolutely get the job of displaying weather done on a meg or two.

I’d bet most of that would be images, the little animations it makes, all the different maps and overlays it needs, the ability to support multiple devices.

You could argue some optimization would benefit it, but at 247MB with an OS that is good at managing memory, I really don’t see how much smaller you could get it to.

I use windows to check the weather and it uses 0MB RAM.

On Mac there's a tonne of animations for the various stages of the day and various types of weather. Even for phases of the moon, and wind map with indication of wind velocity. Took a screenshot for a bit of context:

Interestingly it takes up 400 mb ram whereas messages takes up 610, which I find confusing