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Show HN: VCoding – A 5 MB native Windows IDE with no dynamic dependencies
2 points by Tonyjw2002 60 days ago
Hi HN — I'm Jiawei, one of two co-founders of VCoding.

4.5mb IDE that uses only 8mb of ram!

Github to check it out: https://github.com/Tonyjw2014/Vcoding

A few honest notes since I'd rather front-run the obvious questions:

What "no dynamic dependencies" means in practice: The binary statically links MSVCRT,OpenSSL, and libssh2. Dynamic imports are 13 Windows OS DLLs (kernel32, user32, gdi32, etc.). No Electron, no Qt, no MFC, no Node, no npm. Whether you call that"zero deps" depends on how strict you are; we try to be precise about it.

Some context for why we built this: our vision is to build a infrastructur designed for AI agents use, in the mean time we were tired of every modern dev tool being a 300-500 MB Chromium wrapper. Zed went hard on speed and ended up at ~400 MB with a GPU requirement. We wanted to see how far the other direction could go. Turns out: pretty far.

Happy to answer any questions Thanks for taking a look.

1 comments

"Worth knowing — setContentProtection(true) in Electron calls SetWindowDisplayAffinity with WDA_EXCLUDEFROMCAPTURE on Windows. But it only works on build 19041+. Older builds silently fall back to different behavior. Tripped me up while building a screen-capture-private overlay."
Cool! Noted :D