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Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

> Average exe is ~70-80MB (depends on your code) so it's lighter than most compilers

I know it's JS not actually a compiler but a bundler that just packs node in with your code, but I still had a nice laugh at 80mb being light. I suppose that's where the overton window is in a world of 1gb node_modules folders.

I wish there was a middle ground between this sort of thing and QuickJS (which is actually light, but has a lot of rough edges when it comes to its filesystem and network interfaces)

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Bun also supports this out of the box, and the overhead is likely a bit less (reportedly 30-40MB for a single `console.log` call with no further dependencies - I didn't verify that myself though).

https://bun.sh/docs/bundler/executables

I suspect a large portion of the executable size in both cases is for the ICU library for localization support (Note QuickJS has its own, much smaller l10n library.) It's possible to download a Node binary without ICU, which could trim ~30MB.

> reportedly 30-40MB for a single `console.log` call with no further dependencies - I didn't verify that myself though

I got a 110 MB exe for "console.log('test')" in "test.ts" using "bun build .\test.ts --compile --outfile test.exe". Pretty compressible though, on the order of 1/4th the size pretty easily. Considering it has zstd compression for sourcemaps that'd be an interesting option to add in.

What's light enough when the average user in the western hemisphere has +300gb of storage?

I'm just asking since a 512gb disk has become the standard when ordering a laptop.

The amount of functionality an application provides should be the benchmark for the size rather than one's available disk space. I'm sitting on 20TB+ of available storage and anything over 1MB for a simple "Hello World" is excessive.

Well, if we already could make something in 1 MB, why do we want to achieve the same thing with 100 MB? It is as if there is a mentality of "somehow the higher the size the better".

In professional and enthusiast circles, yes, but I think you underestimate the popularity of cheap laptops.

e.g. currently only 2 of the top 10 selling laptops on Amazon have >=300GB storage.

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-La...

Cheap laptops with a Celeron, 4 GB RAM, and 64 GB storage have been incredibly popular since that formula became popular a handful of years ago. As are base-model MacBook Airs.

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