[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.