Max Bytes allowed for a Pybricks program using Spike Hub?

[johnscary-ev3]

I have been using Pybricks Spike Hub software ver 3.6 and was doing large programs at ~70KB in size with no problem.
Using Visual Code with CoPilot AI now tends to lead to large programs.
Any way I switched one of my Spike Hubs to new Ver 4.0 software and am told that I only have 53KB for program size now.
I suppose the new features have reduced the user space.
What is the plan for future Max Bytes allowed for programs. Will it continue to decrease or do we have a target for Max program size?
Thanks.

[laurensvalk]

Programs like those are very large! It's currently like that due to multiple code slots since they are all held in RAM.

We should be able to make more space again (~256K RAM) if we interactively write them to storage and keep only one in RAM, but this is not done yet.

[johnscary-ev3]

So I guess each of the five slots gets a fixed 53K for 256K total now?
Maybe consider somehow having dynamic slot sizes so we can still load big programs by taking space from other slots?
Thanks.

[laurensvalk]

We're doing that, actually.

I think we're just reporting a conservative limit to the IDE, but we can reconsider that.

What are you building that requires such large programs? I'm curious 😄

[johnscary-ev3]

If the IDE is limiting the size during download of programs but the space actually exists, it would be great to increase that limit.

Since you asked.
My application started off as a simple send a one letter commands to robot from PC and it executes it like move arm or beep horn.
After that I added Remote control using Lego and Xbox remotes and an "Auto Run" mode where in would detect obstacles and turn away.
Then I decided to add a "program mode" where I could enter a series of simple commands and edit it and then execute the sequence.
For example, "sd" step-move command where d= 1,2,3 for 10cm, 20cm etc. or "s1R9" for step-move 10cm and tank turn Right 90dg.
Program was still not very big, but then AI arrived.
So, I added more complex commands like M1R2 for example which does a "Macro move" where 1 = square, R is use Right turns and 2 is length of side (20cm).
This was cool so I added other M options like hexagon, octagon, etc. This complicated the sequence syntax requirements, so I asked AI to write a "Validator" to check my program sequences and also to create a sequence List command to let me know what I had requested with detailed explanations and error checking.
At this point the program started to get much larger since AI can generate a lot of code very fast ;0)
I started getting "byte code" size errors from the compiler on these changes but AI was able to refactor the code to get rid of those.
Then I hit the hub program size limit on Ver 4. Ver 3.6 was ok on the size.
I am considering breaking this app up into two apps, but it is convenient to jump out of my program sequence mode, move the robot with the remote and then jump back into the program sequence mode. Other possibility is to move some of that sequence validation and listing function over to the PC side of my system instead of doing it all on the hub. I would ask AI to do that ;0)
Take care.