It's explained in the blog post, but in short: rust-analyzer stores the data it needs in memory all the time, while Rust Glancer might consume more memory during indexing (because it's not lazy and does more indexing), but after that it only loads _necessary_ information for the duration of the query.

Several things here: 1. We don't need all the information (project can have 1000+ dependencies, while query might only care about the current open file), so the amount of information we load is smaller. 2. Most of the time IDE does not actually do any queries, so if you switch to browser/Slack, you don't pay the tax. 3. Since data is loaded to the disk, after initial indexing restarting no longer consumes that much ram, and you get reindexing for free. 4. Besides offloading, I implement quite a bit of memory optimizations (some of which are covered in docs: https://rust-glancer.github.io/docs/development/MEMORY.html ), so it's a combination of factors.