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Comment by klausa | Hacker News Reader

This is fixed in Xcode 15.

The "absurd payload size" is the effect of having at least four different SDKs (macOS, watchOS, i[Pad]OS, tvOS) bundled, including a simulator for three of them.

Xcode 15 is a ~3.5 gigs download, and includes only macOS SDKs, with all of the other (including the visionOS SDK + sim) ones being downloaded on-demand.

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I swear delta updates were a thing at one point. When did that stop being the case?

They’re still A Thing for App Store apps I think, but:

- using App Store for Xcode was historically very painful and ~nobody who uses Xcode daily downloads it from MAS

- it never worked ~that well~ for Xcode anyway - apart from the big download sizes, the problem with Xcode and the bundled SDKs is that they’re all approximately trillion little text files, and it’s not unheard of to wait longer for codesign (technically unxip) verification than for the download itself, which negates the user-facing benefits of delta upgrades for many users.

I always use MAS to install my production Xcode, specifically because it lets me have small updates.

I've been doing this for as long as it's been available there as a developer at Apple, in my own startup, and in my current role as well. Never had a problem with it.

I've tried MAS many times and never had it work. It always gets stuck downloading at 80% or something.

Never seen it get stuck, but I have seen it take 12 hours to get through that last 20%.

That might have been what happened for me, except I give up and sudo rm -rf it, leaving MAS in a confused state while I go download the dmg/xip directly.

I'm pretty sure mas-cli [https://github.com/mas-cli/mas] is abandonware. It hasn't received any meaningful updates in almost 2 years and most of its features are broken

Xcode is so painful. I had to install it on mojave for some command line program dependency that demanded xcode be installed. Ok, lets try installing xcode via the command line. Turns out that did not install whatever was in the xcode suite that this tool depended on so I needed the web download. Problem was, I am on mojave. It took way to long to dig up the appropriate download link that was compatible. Then of course like all large web downloads from apple, I had to babysit it and restart the download when it failed every couple hundred mb.

Then extract the xip (requires double the space) then wait forever for it to verify. One of the small things I do not miss after quitting being an iPhone dev.

Worth noting Xcode 15 is still in beta which is why I (and other mobile developers I work with) didn't know this was a thing. Glad they eventually got to this, but judging by the upvotes (and my own personal experience) this would have been welcome much sooner.

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