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Comment by siproprio | Hacker News Reader

Does it really have INSTANT startup time (i.e. Sublime Text)?

If it has, I'm interested.

Was not able to find the trial though.

    $ time /opt/oni/Onivim2.AppDir/usr/bin/Oni2 --nofork --silent -c qa

    real    0m0,360s
    user    0m0,280s
    sys     0m0,042s

Yes, the startup time is amazing. You can build from source if you want to try it out without paying. I bought a license and I've been using it on and off for personal projects but it is still in development so don't expect everything to be perfect. Still really good though, actually feels like (is) Vim with a modern UI.

Though it's incredibly painstaking to do a source build; at least in my Arch setup it needed about 20GB of disk space and a lot of time and patience (it needs the Ocaml compiler and also downloads a ton of NPM dependencies!!!), and the PKGBUILD script failed due to a reason I've yet to figure out.

I was thinking about trying out Onivim someday but this one thing was the whole dealbreaker. I thought that if your program is advertised to be light and fast it would also be easy to build, but welp that's unfortunately not the case.

> I was thinking about trying out Onivim someday but this one thing was the whole dealbreaker. I thought that if your program is advertised to be light and fast it would also be easy to build, but welp that's unfortunately not the case.

This is not really a reasonable expectation to have for non-free software. The software is made for those willing to pay the licensing fee to download a prebuilt binary, not those that will end up wanting to compile it themselves. Fast performance != fast build times.

I personally appreciate the fact that the source is even provided - though obviously with a non free license.

I am actually willing to pay it if I can try a demo of it beforehand and confirm that it’s good (like I have paid for Sublime Merge). The problem is that I can’t try it without paying first.

(And I’m also disappointed at the fact that a software that strives for fastness and lightness is so much of a monstrous hassle to build. This has nothing to do with free/non-free software.)

There's a middle ground: they have a cloud based build descriptors (currently reporting as failing, but exists), so one could make use of GitHub's disk and cpu if dedicating that much of a local computer is annoying

I wrote a reddit post[0] about why Oni takes so much space to build, but the TLDR is that we build a bunch of native libraries from scratch on a fresh build, namely Skia.

I would like to note that we don’t maintain/support/promote the Oni package on AUR. Builds from scratch are mostly for “trial” or contribution purposes. We do try to help with build issues in the Discord, though!

I would also disagree with the idea that a light and fast program must be easy/quick to build. C++ is notorious for having huge resource/time requirements to compile, but the end result (assuming good code) can be faster than some C code! Consequently, it takes relatively little time to spin up a node interpreter but the resulting program is orders of magnitude slower.

Oni is written in OCaml, so naturally it requires the OCaml compiler to build. Those NPM packages aren’t JS — we just leverage the existing NPM ecosystem for our native code.

We do recognize that building from scratch is not ideal, which is why we provide prebuilt binaries for purchase. I can’t give an exact timeline, but we’ve discussed publishing public trial builds probably before the end of the year, which further reduces the need to build from scratch.

Feel free to ask any other questions in the Discord!

[0] https://reddit.com/r/onivim/comments/n05pqz/_/gw8hw8p/?conte...

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