The 200MB "Hello World" I shipped my first cross-platform desktop app back in 2018. Markdown editor. Three buttons, a text area, syntax highlighting. The final installer was 187MB. Every time I open Activity Monitor during dev work, I see a handful of Electron-based apps each parked at 300MB. That's well over a gigabyte of RAM for tools I'm not even actively using. A chat client, a code editor, a git GUI, a note-taker. The math finally caught up with me last month, and I started digging into what it would actually take to ship a desktop app that doesn't melt your laptop. This post is about the root cause of that bloat and the path I've been walking to fix it. There's no magic, just a different architectural choice that systems languages like Zig and Rust have made cheap to take. Root cause: every app ships its own browser The popular bundler-based desktop frameworks all follow the same recipe: ship Chromium plus a Node.js runtime alongside your app, then load your HTML/CSS/JS inside it.…