Smaller binary size for compact installation

[COD3HUNT3R]

Current binary size is almost 120MB+ easily even with ReleaseSmall profile. Is there any way to make this small?

[neurocyte]

The size is mostly due to tree-sitter. Flow is a batteries included binary with zero additional files needed after download. 120Mb is actually pretty tiny. Most tree-sitter editors require several GB with the same set of languages installed. The huge advantage of the way flow does it is trivial deployment. All you need is one single file (for your arch at least). You can, just for example, map just the flow binary directly into a docker container and it's installed.

In any case, you have a few options to reduce the binary size:

• Compress flow with upx: this will give you a binary size of around 11Mb (without debug info)
• Build flow without tree-sitter: zig build -Duse_tree_sitter=false -Doptimize=ReleaseSmall will give you a binary size of around 23Mb
• Do both: this should land you around 6Mb

We could release pre-built binaries with no tree-sitter and upx compressed. But no-one has really questioned the binary size up to now. You're the first.

Note: packing the full flow binary with upx will cost you ~70ms of time on startup. I prefer to save the 70ms at the const of 100Mb disk.

[K1DV5]

Hi, I mostly agree about the benefits of having a single binary, but it also limits the number of supported languages. Yes 70 languages is a lot but when there is a language not included, you have to build again with it included. So I think neovim's approach is better here, include the bare minimum, and have a way of dynamically loading the rest.

[heksesang]

For linux packaging it would be nice to separate the tree-sitter stuff. It would allow you to install just the bare minimum and as many tree-sitter packages as you'd want, while also allowing for loading niche languages that might not be included in a batteries-included binary.

I don't know this repository very well yet, but do you think it would require any large refactoring to enable something like that?

[neurocyte]

Eventually it would be nice to support out-of-process tree-sitter parsers. This will allow extending flow with new parsers just by downloading an additional binary. Also, it would make it possible to prevent tree-sitter from ever crashing flow. (rare, but currently possible).