I tried using it once by compiling it from sources. Even a release build is several hundred megabytes in size, which I find pretty wasteful. After a little investigation I found, that it has many plugins in form of a shared library, and each of them has pretty huge size, presumably because the whole Rust standard library is statically linked.
loading story #47291885
Interesting, although I checked and on NixOS the binary is just 29MB. It was statically linked, with just libc left as dynamic.
I think 29MB is still huge for a terminal text editor, but nevertheless not "hundreds".
Language grammars are ~200-250MB though.
They are in a separate folder, and often they are all bundled to support all the languages.
Some of them are HUGE.
.rwxr-xr-x 4.6M aa 6 Mar 21:52 ocaml-interface.so
.rwxr-xr-x 4.6M aa 6 Mar 21:52 rpmspec.so
.rwxr-xr-x 4.9M aa 6 Mar 21:52 tlaplus.so
.rwxr-xr-x 5.1M aa 6 Mar 21:52 ocaml.so
.rwxr-xr-x 5.1M aa 6 Mar 21:52 c-sharp.so
.rwxr-xr-x 5.3M aa 6 Mar 21:52 kotlin.so
.rwxr-xr-x 5.4M aa 6 Mar 21:52 ponylang.so
.rwxr-xr-x 5.5M aa 6 Mar 21:52 slang.so
.rwxr-xr-x 6.1M aa 6 Mar 21:52 crystal.so
.rwxr-xr-x 6.8M aa 6 Mar 21:52 fortran.so
.rwxr-xr-x 9.2M aa 6 Mar 21:52 nim.so
.rwxr-xr-x 9.5M aa 6 Mar 21:52 julia.so
.rwxr-xr-x 9.9M aa 6 Mar 21:52 sql.so
.rwxr-xr-x 16M aa 6 Mar 21:52 lean.so
.rwxr-xr-x 18M aa 6 Mar 21:52 verilog.so
.rwxr-xr-x 22M aa 6 Mar 21:52 systemverilog.soThat's exactly what I found. Why these files should exist at all? Some other IDEs just have a bunch of highlighting rules based on regular expressions and have a folder of tiny XML grammar files instead of a folder of bloaty shared libraries.
loading story #47285583
My local build of helix is 20MB, did you use the suggested flags on the install guide page?