libghostty vs. Alacritty (alacritty_terminal crate) memory usage. This tests pure terminal state with various payloads: empty screen, full screen, 10K row scrollback with plain text, unicode, heavy styling, and mixed. This is the most accurate read to what an embedder sees. So, when you see meme posts about Ghostty (or any of its embedders) memory usage, that is the fault of the application. Ghostty GUI itself certainly has some memory bloat! But its the GUI apps causing this, not libghostty. Note that Ghostty's results include our active scrollback compression, which Alacritty doesn't support. This is fair because it is on by default and happens automatically (while we still have higher IO throughput than Alacritty). It is the proper like-for-like comparison because it's what you'd experience. I included uncompressed numbers too though even though you'd have to actively try to get these, just to show even uncompressed is significantly better. Also, these were all run within the same Rust-written binary that embeds both, so it also avoids measuring the binary overhead differently since they run from an identical binary. I'm working on also measuring libvte and writing a longer form blog post to share the whole testing setup. I needed something to link to whenever I see the memes. libghostty is small, nimble, and excellent software.