Hacker News Reader

Replying to myself, on Pop!_OS I get a final tjs build of 1.8 Mo. My Node weighs 71 M for comparaison.

In fact 1.8 Mb is quite a lot for QuickJS.

My Sciter engine that includes as QuickJS as HTML/CSS engines is about 6 Mb.

My port of QuickJS [1] that also includes persistent storage (think of MongoDB built into JS) is 736 Kb on Windows.

The project also includes wasm3 for WASM, curl and libuv. That's probably what's taking space.

Why is node so large?

V8 alone is around 40/50 Mb.

And used to be under 10 MB.

Probably because Node (and V8) don't try to optimize for size but for speed of execution.