Disabling scenario evaluation in DAML Studio

Mod note: As of SDK 1.5.0 Scenarios have been superseded by the more powerful Daml Script. We now recommend using that for all purposes. For more information, and to learn how to use Script please check out @Andreas’ post on our blog.

Similar to questions that have been asked here: How to build dars but not include scenarios?

But I’m specifically interested in knowing whether there is a flag to switch off scenario evaluation within the IDE i.e damlc ide? I’m just wondering how expensive it is to run these tests as part of the IDE, and whether any performance might be gained by switching them off, for large projects?

My reasoning is that we’re having to spin up some sort of a ledger to do the evaluation, and I expect this to be more expensive than ‘just’ doing syntax analysis. Is that a reasonable assumption?

There is a --scenarios=no flag that you can pass to daml ide -- to disable the scenario service. It is definitely not free, it’s a separate JVM process but in most cases typechecking is probably still your bottleneck.

For reference, the current (large) project I’m working on spins up a 4.3 GB JVM process. So this definitely helps when RAM is limited.