Why do we have to install programs to programfiles and have some leave behind empty folders when uninstalled? Like why cant we just have the standalone .exe thats saved on the desktop? It would be much easier to remove as you just need to delete the icon right?
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So there’s a lot of incomplete answers here it feels like but that’s fair because there are a lot of reasons this would be a terrible idea.
From a technical standpoint
This is literally impossible based on the way a .exe works. First off with Windows (exe files are specifically a Windows thing btw, other operating systems don’t use them) .exe files are limited to 4GB in the first place. You simply can’t make them be bigger than that because windows won’t let you.
But let’s assume that limitation is removed. The way a .exe works is that the entire thing is loaded into your RAM (i won’t go into too much detail about this because otherwise, this answer will get too long for my liking) your average computer has about 4-16 GB of ram and the highest end PCs tend to have around 64-128ish. So outside of some smaller programs, basically impossible for 99% of people. If for some reason you *did* have enough RAM that’s a terrible idea to load a bunch of stuff you don’t need.
But even without that you still have this stuff:
From the developer’s perspective:
1. building a single massive .exe takes a long time. Not writing the code but just like…compiling it and going “ok, here you go customer”
So any time a small change needs to be made instead of being able to tweak one file and then be done and then put together a really small updater you would basically have to build the .exe over again. That’s not super labor intensive when done right but it’s computationally intensive and takes time for a computer to do. No reason to make people wait. Not to mention you now need to have a lot more bandwidth to allow people download lost massive files more often.
2) a lot of software requires that the users manipulate…stuff. It’s less common in basic consumer software but super users and admins need to be able to adjust bits and pieces of the software in ways the developers might not even expect. You can either a) let them edit files using windows and be done with it or b) program some kind of interface they use to edit that data from within the .exe. Option A is basically free, option B is reinventing the wheel and would cost a lot of money. A basic example I can think of is that I used to work for a company and we would ship software to the customer and they could replace the logo. How did they do that? went in and replaced the logo file. That was way easier than writing the code to let them do that within the software itself.
From the user’s perspective:
1. Do you really want to redownload 50+ GB of software for every single update? Probably not.
2. Do you want to have redundancies on your PC? Probably not. Normally programs you run share a lot of different files on your computer it would be a pain to have every single program contain everything it needs to run. Your computer’s storage wouldn’t go anywhere near as far.
3. Do you enjoy/know how to mess around with files on your computer? If you don’t, then having a single file doesn’t really change anything for you. You should touch anything anyway. But if you do that’s now basically impossible. Personally, I do small mods for a lot of games and that means I go in and manually manipulate files. A single .exe makes that impossible.
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