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.

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...

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...

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.

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