IOTTMCO

Weechat isn't lightweight

Weechat is often billed as the not-so-fat cousin to irssi. I’m not entirely sure where people got the idea that irssi was bloated, but it’s out there, and it creates a niche that weechat supposedly fills perfectly.

~ cd irssi
~/irssi sloc src
  Language  Files   Code  Comment  Blank  Total
     Total    317  56169     4221  13271  73661
         C    311  55915     4192  13185  73292
      Perl      6    254       29     86    369
~/irssi cd ../weechat/
~/weechat sloc src
  Language  Files    Code  Comment  Blank   Total
     Total    323  146078    17226  25161  188465
         C    300  145515    16783  25013  187311
     CMake     23     563      443    148    1154

Uh-oh. Weechat has almost three times as much code. Not very convincing so far. But hey, it’s also billed as “modular” - what if we don’t count all the modules?

~/weechat cd src
~/weechat/src ls
CMakeLists.txt  core  gui  Makefile.am  plugins

To be fair, we’ll need to count both the core and gui directories, since the latter is the curses interface, which isn’t really optional.

~/weechat/src sloc core gui
  Language  Files   Code  Comment  Blank  Total
     Total    107  57309     6233   8226  71768
         C    103  57158     6151   8190  71499
     CMake      4    151       82     36    269

So, after ignoring all plugins (many of which implement functionality irssi has built-in anyway), we’re left with 1200 more lines of code. Not bloated, but definitely far from “lightweight”.

If you think irssi bloated, I recommend you use ii. Not because it’s actually any good, but because it’ll disabuse you of the notion that irssi’s size is a serious problem. (You can tell it’s great because it’s hosted on suckless.org.)

All glory to sloc - the source-lines-of-code counter that isn’t bloated.