Propmpt-genned Rust shell is 13x the Ghostty size

[ykurtov]

I was one of the happy early Warp users. Hands down it was the best shell I ever used. Even the early preview was packed with useful dev-features more than any other shell I ever used.

Two years after they pivoted to AI platform it's now 805mb.

``` 805M /Applications/Warp.app 62M /Applications/Ghostty.app ```

[late_night_fix]

Performance,startup time and memory usage matter more in terminal apps than almost anywhere else.That's why people react strongly to this.

[orf]

Why does the on-disk size matter for any of that?

[ykurtov]

Because it will load into RAM. And RAM cost money. Also, quite hard to upgrade on the laptop

[orf]

The entire executable isn’t loaded into RAM.

And are laptops a primary deployment target?

[skydhash]

More code to load from disk to memory, and while it may be fast, it’s not instantaneous.

[orf]

SSDs can read at gigabytes per second, and only the used portions are paged into memory.

Anything else?

[skydhash]

Loading a program in memory is much more complicated than raw disk transfer speed.

[orf]

So you’re saying that if you append 1GB of junk data to the end of an executable it would be slower to execute?

No? So it’s not purely a function of disk size.

[flohofwoe]

...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

E.g. the complete app bundle is 62 MB, of that the executable is 40 MB, but that contains both ARM and x86 code.

[wpm]

Intel Macs are still going to be usable, viable computers for at least another 5 years. It will be a decade before they pass into the night of vintage computing enthusiasts like PowerPC Macs did.