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Comment by globular-toast | Hacker News Reader

Why do I need to download a 7z file to view the source code?

The source code is 150 megabytes, so you wouldn't be able to read it without downloading it either way.

It compresses well (down to, if i remember correctly, 3 megabytes), so this is the preferred way of distributing the program.

Git will compress the objects it stores, so checking in compressed objects is usually redundant.

That may be so, but GitHub has an individual file limit of 100MB, and practically speaking, most people don't want/expect to open a 150 MB text file in their browsers, so I think this is a good compromise (though it might be worth being extra clear in the readme that the malbolge source is in the archive)

Quoting the readme: > What is inside the zip file? > The release bundle includes interpreter binaries [...]. malbolgelisp-v1.1.mb is the source code for the interpreter.

The way I parsed that when I first read it, I took it to mean that the filename of the lisp interpreter was "malbolgelisp-v1.1.mb" and was somewhere else in the repo, not in the 7zip archive with the interpreter binaries. I see what it means now, but the two ideas felt disjointed on my first reading.

> Git will compress the objects it stores

Only when they get packed, and it doesn't exactly help when github will reject individual objects larger than 100MB inflated.

Thanks for the answer. No thanks to the >= 3 people who decided to downvote my question.

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