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Comment by cutler | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone tell me why Racket requires 900Mb of disk space? It's just a Lisp when all's said and done.

I am not at my main computer at the moment so I can't confirm yet, but IIRC Racket is available as a much smaller language core set of tools sufficient to run CLI scripts.

I consider Racket to be a "batteries included", curated distribution of the Racket lang CLI tools, plus a lot of libraries, including libraries for GUI development. Lots of documentation and the IDE.

The TeXLive distribution might be somewhat analogous; billions of bytes of fonts and GUI apps, a package manager...

https://www.tug.org/texlive/

The full installation includes an IDE, a documentation system, a web server, a bunch of graphical games, a slide presentation program, significant educational software, and more, plus thousands of pages of docs. If you want a smaller program to install, the Minimal Racket distribution will use much less space, and is still a full-featured Lisp.

Adding more details: To download the minimal version: https://download.racket-lang.org/releases/8.2/

The installer is 1/5 of the full version. I'm too lazy to install both side by side to see the amount of disk after installation.

Also, once the minimal version is installed, it's possible to add some of the packages to get a custom intermediate version, or even just add all the packages and get the full version.

it doesn't, https://archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/racket/ according to arch its ~500MB. The installer is ~200 but unpacked is all the documentation and etc. The switch to Chez Scheme backend has upped the size because it no longer outputs bytecode but machinecode directly

It comes with lot of libraries and a compiler, not sure if it's the reason

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