8 points | by ykurtov 7 hours ago
7 comments
Performance,startup time and memory usage matter more in terminal apps than almost anywhere else.That's why people react strongly to this.
Why does the on-disk size matter for any of that?
More code to load from disk to memory, and while it may be fast, it’s not instantaneous.
SSDs can read at gigabytes per second, and only the used portions are paged into memory.
Anything else?
Loading a program in memory is much more complicated than raw disk transfer speed.
...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
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.
Performance,startup time and memory usage matter more in terminal apps than almost anywhere else.That's why people react strongly to this.
Why does the on-disk size matter for any of that?
More code to load from disk to memory, and while it may be fast, it’s not instantaneous.
SSDs can read at gigabytes per second, and only the used portions are paged into memory.
Anything else?
Loading a program in memory is much more complicated than raw disk transfer speed.
...and you could probably shave off 20 MB from Ghostty because it is distributed as universal binary (does that even make sense in 2026)?
E.g. the complete app bundle is 62 MB, of that the executable is 40 MB, but that contains both ARM and x86 code.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.