Propmpt-genned Rust shell is 13x the Ghostty size | Hacker News Reader

Propmpt-genned Rust shell is 13x the Ghostty size

8 pointsykurtov10 comments

I was one of the happy early Warp users. Hands down it was the best shell I ever used. Even the early preview was packed with useful dev-features more than any other shell I ever used.

Two years after they pivoted to AI platform it's now 805mb.

``` 805M /Applications/Warp.app 62M /Applications/Ghostty.app ```

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Performance,startup time and memory usage matter more in terminal apps than almost anywhere else.That's why people react strongly to this.

Why does the on-disk size matter for any of that?

More code to load from disk to memory, and while it may be fast, it’s not instantaneous.

SSDs can read at gigabytes per second, and only the used portions are paged into memory.

Anything else?

Loading a program in memory is much more complicated than raw disk transfer speed.

So you’re saying that if you append 1GB of junk data to the end of an executable it would be slower to execute?

No? So it’s not purely a function of disk size.

Because it will load into RAM. And RAM cost money. Also, quite hard to upgrade on the laptop

The entire executable isn’t loaded into RAM.

And are laptops a primary deployment target?

...and you could probably shave off 20 MB from Ghostty because it is distributed as universal binary (does that even make sense in 2026)?

    > ls -al ghostty
    total 81992
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 floh  staff  41979664 Mar 13 17:08 ghostty
    > file ghostty
    ghostty: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable     x86_64] [arm64]
    ghostty (for architecture x86_64):      Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
    ghostty (for architecture arm64):       Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64

E.g. the complete app bundle is 62 MB, of that the executable is 40 MB, but that contains both ARM and x86 code.

Intel Macs are still going to be usable, viable computers for at least another 5 years. It will be a decade before they pass into the night of vintage computing enthusiasts like PowerPC Macs did.

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