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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

It better be at a 30GB install size.

Install size depends on the features you pick when you install. Web / service / library development is small, desktop / mobile / C++ gets bigger as the toolchains + sdks + emulators are big. If your VS install is 30 GB and that's a problem, run the installer, click modify, and uncheck stuff you're not using. A lot of devs check off everything "just in case" but since you can add other features when you need them, it's better to start with what you know you'll use.

A 2TB nvme drive is less than $200. If VS is saving significant dev time, people would install it even if much larger install.

I think people question why VS is so freaking huge when it's contemporaries are not.

Most of that disk size is supposedly in the toolchain (requiring 2-60GB of disk space alone[1]). Why is this so big? Modern toolchains from other vendors are not this large.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022...

I have spotted someone that has never done Apple, Google, UNIX or game console native development.

It turns out native code for all kinds of OS workloads take some space.

I'm not sure it's 10x as nice as competitors, which is the context here. If it were just about space who cares, but when your competitor does the exact same at a much smaller size and ultimately better price too, it's a little confusing what is going on with VS.

It needs to be 10x nicer to make up for a 10x disk space footprint? What if it were only 1GB and the competitors were only 100Mb? Would it still need to be 10x nicer?

The competitor doesn't ship a full OS SDK for all kinds of development.

Go see how much GB, Apple or Android development stacks require.

    $ pacman -Qi emacs | grep Size 
    Installed Size  : 111,46 MiB

I guess if anything you is Emacs Lisp, targeting the Emacs OS, then ok.

IDK if it's related but I have like a 50% install success rate. Seems to be complicated.

Come on, my whole OS fits 3 times into that, let alone every single other programming language’s build tools with debug symbols, everything combined.

So what exactly does VS save you? Hell, I can’t even imagine what’s inside that.

Also transparent compression is a thing in case you need to squeeze out more space. And I don't mean the shoddy NTFS active compression. It received support for much more efficient compression algorithms since win10 which are accessible using compact.exe[0], albeit passive rather than active so there is decay once files get modified.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

Mine's generally around 10GB as I omit all the mobile dev stack and images.

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