alt Hacker NewsI tried using it once by compiling it from sources. Even a release build is several hundred megabytes in size, which I find pretty wasteful. After a little investigation I found, that it has many plugins in form of a shared library, and each of them has pretty huge size, presumably because the whole Rust standard library is statically linked.
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whytevuhuni • yesterday at 6:45 AM
Interesting, although I checked and on NixOS the binary is just 29MB. It was statically linked, with just libc left as dynamic.
I think 29MB is still huge for a terminal text editor, but nevertheless not "hundreds".
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small_scombrus • yesterday at 7:12 AM
My local build of helix is 20MB, did you use the suggested flags on the install guide page?
Those huge plugin files result from Rust duplicating libstd into each plugin at link time when crates are built as cdylib or staticlib, and you can prove it with cargo-bloat or by inspecting DT_NEEDED and symbol sizes with readelf -d and ldd.
If you control the build, force shared std linking with RUSTFLAGS='-C prefer-dynamic' and crate-type = ['dylib'] so host and plugins share libstd and accept the need for matching toolchains, or switch to a different plugin model like compiling to WASM and running modules with wasmtime or exposing a small C-ABI shim into a single shared runtime, and use strip plus LTO for quick size wins.