[tsimionescu]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'an engine', but people who choose Electron typically don't want a rendering engine like Servo, they want to write a web app and have it installed locally. They need a rendering engine, a JS runtime, a DOM handler, an HTTP client library, WebSockets support etc - they want a whole browser.

Also, 150MB is not really that scary of a size in today's world. Also, a huge part of it is simply because of static linking - if they split it into dynamic libraries, the actual content of any individual Electron-based app would be reduced significantly. But people are mostly allergic to dynamic libraries, so we pay the cost in larger binaries. Also note that vim with all its dependencies is ~40 MB, without a GUI.

[Deukhoofd]

> Also note that vim with all its dependencies is ~40 MB, without a GUI

That's mostly just due to vim-runtime though, and the documentation in many different languages. The actual vim executable is around 3 MB.

[tsimionescu]

Can the vim executable run without vim-runtime, or the other shared libaries it installz? I don't know the internal architecture of vim, I am genuinely asking.

[int_19h]

> Also, 150MB is not really that scary of a size in today's world

That very much depends on where you live.

[Jweb_Guru]

To be honest, a lot of people really do just want a layout engine.