They could probably lazily install the grammars like neovim does, but as someone who doesn't have much faith in the reliability of internet infrastructure, I'll personally take it...
Just ran `:TSInstall all` in neovim out of curiosity, and the results were predictable:
~/.local/share/nvim/lazy/nvim-treesitter/parser
files 309
size 232M
/usr/lib/helix/runtime/grammars
files 246
size 185M
If disk space is important for your use case, I guess filesystem compression would save far more than just compressing binaries with upx. btrfs+zstd handle those .so well: $ compsize ~/.local/share/nvim/lazy/nvim-treesitter/parser
Type Perc Disk Usage Uncompressed Referenced
TOTAL 11% 26M 231M 231M
$ compsize /usr/lib/helix/runtime/grammars
Type Perc Disk Usage Uncompressed Referenced
TOTAL 12% 23M 184M 184M