8 points | by ykurtov 4 hours ago
4 comments
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.
...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
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.
...and you could probably shave off 20 MB from Ghostty because it is distributed as universal binary (does that even make sense in 2026)?
E.g. the complete app bundle is 62 MB, of that the executable is 40 MB, but that contains both ARM and x86 code.