I'm still amazed how small the Godot editor is (last time I checked it was ~25MB). Just how are they able to pack this much functionality into such little space?
In the late 80s I was impressed by a full Wordstar compatible text editor for Turbo Pascal which only occupied 25K (including the compiler). Times have indeed changed.
When I cloned the godot repo, I could understand the architecture just by the file names.
I started falling in love with it as the easily understandable file names started streaming down from the cloud.
It's truly a public good.
For comparison, emacs's installed size is 76K [1].
On my system the emacs executable is 39M and the entire installed package is 128M. (Additionally, my Doom Emacs folder takes up another 840M.)
HOW?
But on Windows, it seems that every app like this is essentially a Linux/mSys distro that just happens to run the application.
Of course, apps in general are getting that way.
I work at an engineering firm, and that's how most engineers understand it.
There is Wirth's law ("software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster").
Generally, developers don't like performance, for some weird reason. The 97% Knuth quote might have played a major role, unfortunately it doesn't apply to game development at all. It's always a compromise between speed and code size.
For the rest, too many developers are not educated about electronics or physics, and often disregard important topics like memory management and data structures. But computer science always is complex. The generalization of garbage collected languages is also a big problem (see Minecraft)
Another problem is the lack of discipline and OSHA-like regulations in software development. The software industry is too anarchic and liberal-minded (Silicon Valley-style venture capitalism has a lot to do with this). It results in a lot of work being easily thrown away.
The fact that the Godot editor includes the Godot runtime along with its own UI- and graphics stack (if I'm not mistaken?) in such a small bundle makes this even more impressive to me.
The official binaries include everything, but many of the larger bits are optional and can be disabled during build time to reduce the size of the executable: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/development/compiling...