It's large, of course. But you have a full VM and a bunch of unminified javascript dependencies sitting in there. V8 isn't known for being small, either.

Compared to a proper systems language it's always going to look ridiculous. And it appears to be 3-4x larger than, say, py2exe. You can apparently get about a 30% reduction using `strip`, and there's likely other low-hanging fruit.

It's about 12MB compressed. It's not so terrible in today's world, and the simplicity at runtime is worthwhile IMO. I don't worry too much about my tools getting larger, so long as they solve problems and don't cause them.