Trim bundled syntect syntax set (largest discretionary binary weight) #118

Verdict — closing as won't-do (2026-08-22)

The dominant size problem this issue descended from was already solved by the highlighter migration itself: commit 1ebfaa41 replaced gpui-component's embedded tree-sitter-languages grammar pack (~38 MB) with syntect driven by bat's compiled dump, taking the release binary from 61 MB to 25 MB.

What remains is the 968 KiB syntaxes.bin — about 1.5% of the binary. Curating a tcode-specific syntax set would trade that marginal saving for a permanent maintenance burden (a bespoke regeneration pipeline, coverage decisions per language, and a new way to regress highlighting). The stability problems in the asset were fixed separately by #181 (sanitizer + exhaustive regex validation + panic fallback), and the broad 220-language coverage is a feature, not waste.

Not worth it. Reopen only if the binary-size budget tightens enough that ~1 MB matters.

Original issue (for the record)

• crates/ui/Cargo.toml uses syntect 5.3 with parsing, regex-fancy, and dump-load.
• crates/ui/src/highlight.rs embeds crates/ui/assets/syntaxes.bin (~968 KiB, derived from bat's broad syntax set) at startup.
• Proposal was: measure artifact size and startup cost, regenerate a curated language set, keep plain rendering as fallback, and compare before deciding on a highlighter swap.