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I thought that was a totally reasonable file size too, until I looked up Docker image sizes for node:

https://hub.docker.com/r/library/node/tags/

Regular images are ~260MB and "slim" images are 85MB, but Alpine-based images are a paltry 18MB.

So it seems something in the Node.js compiler is ballooning up the size of the code, by a factor of about three. I wonder what.

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It really depends on version of node, and the modules used. I'm more inclined to want to see what can be done as a minimal electron... or seeing electron go the adobe air route, and have a shared (continuous updating) base, but that could prove problematic as binary modules (namely sqlite) are common.

AFAIK Alpine Linux is using musl which would explain the low binary size.

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