nushell: Installation size using Homebrew is unacceptable (~350 MBs)

Well, not a bug with Nu per se, and not even sure if this should be reported here or on homebrew-core, so tell me if this should be opened there instead.

So I just run brew upgrade and was greeted with this:

$ brew upgrade
...
==> Pouring nushell--0.35.0.big_sur.bottle.tar.gz
🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/nushell/0.35.0: 27 files, 343.2MB
...

(The size was also similar when I upgraded to 0.34.0, but I didn’t notice at the time yet)

I’m not sure if this is known or not, but I thought I’d bring attention to this, as I don’t think a shell should be taking up such a large chunk of disk space.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 3 years ago
Reactions: 3
Comments: 24 (15 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

The current published binaries are optimized for speed rather than for size.

sophiajt on Aug 5, 2021

We decided to prioritize speed over size

and how much speed did you gain with such a sizeable increase in size?

download a release from our repo

that doesn’t seem gain anything. Homebrew’s install is ~350m, repo’s unpacked size ~370m

separate plugins out of the release entirely

Is there a convenient list of plugins with a brief description of how they are used so it’s easier to tell what can be easily deleted? Checked the docs, but only found a link to the repo with the plugins’ source code, not general description

eugenesvk on Dec 29, 2021

I’d like to keep this issue open as we’re actively working to shrink the size of the installation. Recently, we merged in some of the plugins into Nu itself, which cut down on duplicate code in the installation binary and we’re doing further investigations here.

sophiajt on Sep 3, 2021