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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

There's definitely room for subjectivity, but my hard drive space is finite. And XCode takes up more room than all of my Jetbrains software combined.

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Xcode download is only a couple GBs

12-20 GB, and only that if you don't want to run software on any iOS simulator.

Xcode 26.2 is a 2.1GB download, which expands to 8.63GB on disk, which includes the macOS SDK. The iOS SDK and simulators are another 8.38GB. Luckily Xcode versions can share iOS SDKs now, so you only need to install them once. Really the biggest disk eater is Xcode's default behavior of creating a huge set of simulators for every platform.

At 8.6gb of disk usage, they could include the entire macOS Mojave ISO disk image[0] and still have ~930 MB to include fit the IDE. It's just unprecedented.

[0] https://archive.org/details/mac-osx-mojave-iso

Indeed, and unless that changed since, the Mac downloader isn't even capable of resuming downloads properly so if anything happens while you download these 13GB, it's back to square one.

For years, my team uses the third-party tool `xcodes`... `brew install xcodes` or use the [GUI](https://www.xcodes.app/).

It allows you to easily install and maintain several versions of Xcode (beta / RC versions).

And, more importantly, uses aria2 for HTTP download, which has resumability.

Now this is the stuff that Apple should be Sherlocking, but doesn't.

The comment is wrong, the download is ~2 GB

You’re counting the development SDK against the IDE. Xcode itself doesn’t require that space, and you’d need that space regardless of IDE choice if you were targeting the platform.

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