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Comment by evmar | Hacker News Reader

This looks really nice, but I am confused why the install is over 350mb, including a 300mb binary. I thought Electron-based stuff was big but this is even somehow more!?

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The core app itself is 100% Rust, but it supports integration via Microsoft's Language Server Protocol[0][1]. In practice, this means you will be running daemons locally for each language, which may be written in any language. Often these daemons are written in NodeJS since the reference implementation[2] is in NodeJS.

[0] https://zed.dev/docs/adding-new-languages#lsp

[1] https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/

[2] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-languageserver-node

It doesn’t follow that a language server written with JavaScript and run via node will bloat the binary by hundreds of MB. Are they bundling a node runtime too?

Maybe if they are embedding dozens of language servers and runtimes it could bloat the binary, but I assumed the extensions and language servers would be downloaded on demand.

But a rust binary by itself shouldn’t be that large. LSP is just a simple json protocol, so parsing it doesn’t require hundreds of MB.

When I opened a Rust project I think the status bar said it was downloading Rust support, which supports your hypothesis. (Also it doesn't make much sense to bundle these things when they are all making new releases at different schedules.)

Hey, Zed developer here. Indeed we do not bundle the LSP binaries into the final binary for the reasons you've stated; and I do agree that the binary is kind of big, though at present .dmg compression gets us a long way (as the .dmg itself is ~115Mb). Right now we ship an universal binary, so half of that size is essentially unused:

  size /Applications/Zed.app/Contents/MacOS/zed
  __TEXT __DATA __OBJC others dec hex
  120979456 475136 0 4336828416 4458283008 109bc0000 zed (for 
  architecture x86_64)
  117587968 458752 0 4336680960 4454727680 10985c000 zed (for 
  architecture arm64)

Then, each of these binaries includes about 40MB of assets. I've actually had a PR up (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/3997) that reduced their size quite significantly, though that did not end up reducing the size of a .dmg itself, so I've scraped that. On top of that, we ship with debug symbols for symbolication of crashes (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L...).

At least it’s fast after installing that 350mb blob. Often it’s a sign that something is going to be really slow.

It comes with quite a few language servers built-in.

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