6 ms·

For me SDK sizes are showstopper. Mingw packages are probably 100-200 Mb total. To build anything native one has to install Windows (20+Gb in modern version and

by nshm 4y ago

For me SDK sizes are showstopper. Mingw packages are probably 100-200 Mb total. To build anything native one has to install Windows (20+Gb in modern version and then Visual Studio 40+Gb). Not so easy to fit it all on an SSD drive. Xcode also have this problem now. 8Gb for Xcode 7 is manageable. But why 70Gb for Xcode 11?

recursive 4y ago
There are very few things that actually require Visual Studio just to build.
- steeleduncan 4y ago
  Interesting, how can I install just the cmake + msvc to do command line builds with windows? I'm also installing wsl2 + mingw because it is so much lighter for compilation than many, many gigabytes of vis studio.
  - aaron-stackbit 4y ago
    `msbuild` is what I used back in the day. It seems to still exist, but I have no idea if this is still preferred solution. I just use WSL 2 these days, and live with the extra io latency.
  - e4m2 4y ago
    Download the build tools[0] and choose the appropriate options. I'd personally consider the following a good baseline: MSVC v143, CMake tools, Windows 11 SDK, Clang tools (if you don't want/need these you can shave off 3.5 GB). `zig cc` is another interesting alternative, it's just a single ~62 MB download. [0] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#build-tools-for-visual-studio-2022 https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#build-tools-fo...
    - steeleduncan 4y ago
      Thanks, I'll give that a try!
xboxnolifes 4y ago
> To build anything native one has to install Windows (20+Gb in modern version and then Visual Studio 40+Gb). Not so easy to fit it all on an SSD drive. Maybe a decade ago, but SSDs are so much cheaper per GB nowadays. Around $0.11/GB. Pretty sure that's cheaper than the first 1TB HDD I've owned.
- nshm 4y ago
  Not when you are on Macbook. Don't suggest external drives please ;)
  - landryraccoon 4y ago
    But you don't have to develop on Macbook. So you intentionally chose a platform known for being really expensive and now your main complaint is that it's too expensive? I don't really think that the toolchain is to blame for that one.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - sumy23 4y ago
      I do need to develop on a Macbook. The hardware is just so much better than anything else out there. This is my personal opinion of course, but I would rather stop being a software developer than to develop software using a different laptop available on the market today.
      - forrestthewoods 4y ago
        Meanwhile I’d rather serve coffee than be a software developer on any laptop! I can’t fathom developing on anything other than a high-end desktop. M1 is very impressive. But I hate macOS as much, if not more than, you hate Windows. My Threadripper makes me very happy.
        4y ago
swarnie 4y ago
A 1tb M.2 drive is what... £70? If that's out of reach im not sure how you're powering your dev machine.
- coder543 4y ago
  > > Xcode also have this problem now. 8Gb for Xcode 7 is manageable. But why 70Gb for Xcode 11? > A 1tb M.2 drive is what... £70? To be contextually fair, Apple charges $400, and the storage isn't replaceable. Who runs their editor off of an external drive? I imagine the number is very small. Although, on my machine, Xcode only seems to be taking up 17GB, not 70GB.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dotopotoro 4y ago
  It’s not bleeding edge raytracing stuff. “Get better hardware” is far from appropriate response.
pjmlp 4y ago
Mingw doesn't support anything other than basic UNIX on top of Win32, naturally they take so little.
slimsag 4y ago
I'm cross-compiling Mach engine[0] with Zig, it ends up being a quite small toolchain to cross-compile a game engine (using DirectX, Vulkan, OpenGL, and Metal on respective platforms) from any OS. The Zig toolchain is: * Windows: 61 MiB * Linux (x86): 49 MiB * macOS (x86): 42 MiB * macOS (arm): 38 MiB Zig provides almost everything that is needed to cross compile to those same targets out of the box, including libc and some system libraries. Except macOS frameworks and some updated DirectX headers/libraries (provides MinGW ones), which we bundle and ship separately: * Windows: 7 MiB (updated D3D12 headers & libs) * MacOS: 112 MiB (almost all frameworks provided by XCode, for x86+arm+iOS) * Linux (x86): 22 MiB (x11/wayland headers & libs) * Linux (arm): 15 MiB That's full cross compilation of WebGPU GUI applications to all desktop platforms in under ~217 MiB for most platforms. [0] https://machengine.org https://machengine.org
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
  You can accomplish similar things by targeting, say, SDL2 with a C compiler. It's a nice solution when you don't need platform-specific stuff, but it's not a general substitute for having the platform SDK, alas. With that said, targeting SDL2 is what I do… but the apps I like to write are games.
  - slimsag 4y ago
    Actually, it's better - my work includes everything needed to build: * GLFW * Dawn (Chrome's WebGPU implementation) * The DirectX Shader Compiler (a fork of LLVM) * Freetype and HarfBuzz All from source, cross-compiled to every OS. Plus with Zig you can link+sign macOS binaries from Linux and Windows (AFAIK that's not possible with a regular C compiler, but maybe that's changed recently?)
- password4321 4y ago
  Zig's toolchain is awesome; I was very sad to discover they don't support my comfy, ancient MacBook Air.
cptskippy 4y ago
Visual Studio's install size is highly dependent on what you install. The minimum size is only 800mb, everything is 120gb. Many of the high level categories, like Web Development,contain features you'll probably never use. If you're concerned about file size you can do a custom install to get a very lean install. That being said, I would still recommend a Windows VM be allocated a 120Gb drive.
schemescape 4y ago
I ran into this when trying to test out Rust. On Windows, they recommend using native tools that require a multi-gigabyte download via the Visual Studio installer (and this is just for tools--not Visual Studio, the IDE). It was annoying for me because part of the reason I wanted to try Rust on Windows was specifically to avoid multi-gigabyte C/C++ toolchain downloads. I bet the actual compiler and linker aren't that big, so I kind of wonder where all those bytes are going... Aside: I see a sibling comment mentions Zig. While I haven't really explored Zig, the tiny single-binary download was a breath of fresh air. Go also had a quick and easy download, but I wanted a language without a garbage collector.
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  Try cross-compiling Go apps that use GTK3 if you’d like to spend a few days in intense pain. It’s not there yet. Electron apps are probably the closest thing we have today that actually works correctly on Win / Linux / Mac.
seanp2k2 4y ago
The other problem with Xcode is that it won’t run on anything except a Mac, and MacOS licensing prevents one from running it on non-Mac hardware or virtualizing it. That’s why services like https://www.macstadium.com/ https://www.macstadium.com/ and AWS mac instances exist, but it’s very annoying to have to work around this just because of dinosaur business models and licensing.
maccard 4y ago
The visual studio build tools are substantially smaller than 40GB. My IDE install is about 25GB, and visual studio has distributed the build tools separately since vs2015 - my toolchains directory is about 4GB including whatever dotnet runtimes, windows GDK. > Not so easy to fit it all on an SSD drive. Professionally, no excuse. As an open source or otherwise unpaid pursuit, a 250GB SSD is about $45 on Amazon right now. That more than comfortably fits your 60GB estimate, with plenty of room to spare.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  It's interesting how people assume that their world is everyone else's... It's easy to forget that there are billions of people for whom $45 is a massive investment, and that SSD isn't so conveniently available even if they have the money. I know I got into programming on a mix of graphing calculators and thrown out PCs, and I also distinctly remember having to work around the download sizes of tooling because I was using really crappy internet. I don't think it's unreasonable for the poster to wish that they could build useful binaries without 60GBs of downloading and storage...
  - dgfitz 4y ago
    I’d say the part where the gp specifically said ssd invalidates your point __in this particular situtation__ because a person worried about their budget wouldn’t splurge on an ssd. I also, after a cursory search, have found that the cheapest hard drives are around $25 USD. While $20 isn’t nothing, it also isn’t budget-breaking.
    - BoorishBears 4y ago
      ... what? You think someone stretching their money for an SSD somehow indicates that they're not worried about their budget? Here's a hint: if they had the budget and availability they'd just get a bigger SSD and not write that comment. - Obviously, due to some aspect of their circumstance, be it availability, cost, download speeds, etc. the size of the toolkit is problematic. I mean there's no intrinsic size for a development toolkit, but I don't know anyone who'd say 60GBs of data is a small development toolkit when as others have pointed out, there are older versions of the same Windows toolchains that still complete the same function and manage to take a fraction of the space...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
CuriousCosmic 4y ago
There's tooling that mostly avoids this. https://github.com/Jake-Shadle/xwin https://github.com/Jake-Shadle/xwin This is a utility that fixes a lot of the cross-compiling issues for windows by giving you a portable, unfucked naming, and not-massive SDK. It's the same SDK you get when you install MSVC but it's only a few hundred megs and the names are consistent even with all of Windows' fucked up tooling. The only caveat is you need to provide your own compiler, in this case clang is often the best option.
navjack27 4y ago
How is that too big for an SSD? My computer is ALL SSDs. What kind of shit drives u buying?

by nshm 4y ago

recursive 4y ago

There are very few things that actually require Visual Studio just to build.

steeleduncan 4y ago
Interesting, how can I install just the cmake + msvc to do command line builds with windows? I'm also installing wsl2 + mingw because it is so much lighter for compilation than many, many gigabytes of vis studio.
- aaron-stackbit 4y ago
  `msbuild` is what I used back in the day. It seems to still exist, but I have no idea if this is still preferred solution. I just use WSL 2 these days, and live with the extra io latency.
- e4m2 4y ago
  Download the build tools[0] and choose the appropriate options. I'd personally consider the following a good baseline: MSVC v143, CMake tools, Windows 11 SDK, Clang tools (if you don't want/need these you can shave off 3.5 GB). `zig cc` is another interesting alternative, it's just a single ~62 MB download. [0] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#build-tools-for-visual-studio-2022 https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#build-tools-fo...
  - steeleduncan 4y ago
    Thanks, I'll give that a try!

xboxnolifes 4y ago

> To build anything native one has to install Windows (20+Gb in modern version and then Visual Studio 40+Gb). Not so easy to fit it all on an SSD drive. Maybe a decade ago, but SSDs are so much cheaper per GB nowadays. Around $0.11/GB. Pretty sure that's cheaper than the first 1TB HDD I've owned.

nshm 4y ago
Not when you are on Macbook. Don't suggest external drives please ;)
- landryraccoon 4y ago
  But you don't have to develop on Macbook. So you intentionally chose a platform known for being really expensive and now your main complaint is that it's too expensive? I don't really think that the toolchain is to blame for that one.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - sumy23 4y ago
    I do need to develop on a Macbook. The hardware is just so much better than anything else out there. This is my personal opinion of course, but I would rather stop being a software developer than to develop software using a different laptop available on the market today.
    - forrestthewoods 4y ago
      Meanwhile I’d rather serve coffee than be a software developer on any laptop! I can’t fathom developing on anything other than a high-end desktop. M1 is very impressive. But I hate macOS as much, if not more than, you hate Windows. My Threadripper makes me very happy.
      - 4y ago

swarnie 4y ago

A 1tb M.2 drive is what... £70? If that's out of reach im not sure how you're powering your dev machine.

coder543 4y ago
> > Xcode also have this problem now. 8Gb for Xcode 7 is manageable. But why 70Gb for Xcode 11? > A 1tb M.2 drive is what... £70? To be contextually fair, Apple charges $400, and the storage isn't replaceable. Who runs their editor off of an external drive? I imagine the number is very small. Although, on my machine, Xcode only seems to be taking up 17GB, not 70GB.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dotopotoro 4y ago
It’s not bleeding edge raytracing stuff. “Get better hardware” is far from appropriate response.

pjmlp 4y ago

Mingw doesn't support anything other than basic UNIX on top of Win32, naturally they take so little.

slimsag 4y ago

I'm cross-compiling Mach engine[0] with Zig, it ends up being a quite small toolchain to cross-compile a game engine (using DirectX, Vulkan, OpenGL, and Metal on respective platforms) from any OS. The Zig toolchain is: * Windows: 61 MiB * Linux (x86): 49 MiB * macOS (x86): 42 MiB * macOS (arm): 38 MiB Zig provides almost everything that is needed to cross compile to those same targets out of the box, including libc and some system libraries. Except macOS frameworks and some updated DirectX headers/libraries (provides MinGW ones), which we bundle and ship separately: * Windows: 7 MiB (updated D3D12 headers & libs) * MacOS: 112 MiB (almost all frameworks provided by XCode, for x86+arm+iOS) * Linux (x86): 22 MiB (x11/wayland headers & libs) * Linux (arm): 15 MiB That's full cross compilation of WebGPU GUI applications to all desktop platforms in under ~217 MiB for most platforms. [0] https://machengine.org https://machengine.org

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
You can accomplish similar things by targeting, say, SDL2 with a C compiler. It's a nice solution when you don't need platform-specific stuff, but it's not a general substitute for having the platform SDK, alas. With that said, targeting SDL2 is what I do… but the apps I like to write are games.
- slimsag 4y ago
  Actually, it's better - my work includes everything needed to build: * GLFW * Dawn (Chrome's WebGPU implementation) * The DirectX Shader Compiler (a fork of LLVM) * Freetype and HarfBuzz All from source, cross-compiled to every OS. Plus with Zig you can link+sign macOS binaries from Linux and Windows (AFAIK that's not possible with a regular C compiler, but maybe that's changed recently?)
password4321 4y ago
Zig's toolchain is awesome; I was very sad to discover they don't support my comfy, ancient MacBook Air.

cptskippy 4y ago

Visual Studio's install size is highly dependent on what you install. The minimum size is only 800mb, everything is 120gb. Many of the high level categories, like Web Development,contain features you'll probably never use. If you're concerned about file size you can do a custom install to get a very lean install. That being said, I would still recommend a Windows VM be allocated a 120Gb drive.

schemescape 4y ago

I ran into this when trying to test out Rust. On Windows, they recommend using native tools that require a multi-gigabyte download via the Visual Studio installer (and this is just for tools--not Visual Studio, the IDE). It was annoying for me because part of the reason I wanted to try Rust on Windows was specifically to avoid multi-gigabyte C/C++ toolchain downloads. I bet the actual compiler and linker aren't that big, so I kind of wonder where all those bytes are going... Aside: I see a sibling comment mentions Zig. While I haven't really explored Zig, the tiny single-binary download was a breath of fresh air. Go also had a quick and easy download, but I wanted a language without a garbage collector.

seanp2k2 4y ago
Try cross-compiling Go apps that use GTK3 if you’d like to spend a few days in intense pain. It’s not there yet. Electron apps are probably the closest thing we have today that actually works correctly on Win / Linux / Mac.

seanp2k2 4y ago

The other problem with Xcode is that it won’t run on anything except a Mac, and MacOS licensing prevents one from running it on non-Mac hardware or virtualizing it. That’s why services like https://www.macstadium.com/ https://www.macstadium.com/ and AWS mac instances exist, but it’s very annoying to have to work around this just because of dinosaur business models and licensing.

maccard 4y ago

The visual studio build tools are substantially smaller than 40GB. My IDE install is about 25GB, and visual studio has distributed the build tools separately since vs2015 - my toolchains directory is about 4GB including whatever dotnet runtimes, windows GDK. > Not so easy to fit it all on an SSD drive. Professionally, no excuse. As an open source or otherwise unpaid pursuit, a 250GB SSD is about $45 on Amazon right now. That more than comfortably fits your 60GB estimate, with plenty of room to spare.

BoorishBears 4y ago
It's interesting how people assume that their world is everyone else's... It's easy to forget that there are billions of people for whom $45 is a massive investment, and that SSD isn't so conveniently available even if they have the money. I know I got into programming on a mix of graphing calculators and thrown out PCs, and I also distinctly remember having to work around the download sizes of tooling because I was using really crappy internet. I don't think it's unreasonable for the poster to wish that they could build useful binaries without 60GBs of downloading and storage...
- dgfitz 4y ago
  I’d say the part where the gp specifically said ssd invalidates your point __in this particular situtation__ because a person worried about their budget wouldn’t splurge on an ssd. I also, after a cursory search, have found that the cheapest hard drives are around $25 USD. While $20 isn’t nothing, it also isn’t budget-breaking.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    ... what? You think someone stretching their money for an SSD somehow indicates that they're not worried about their budget? Here's a hint: if they had the budget and availability they'd just get a bigger SSD and not write that comment. - Obviously, due to some aspect of their circumstance, be it availability, cost, download speeds, etc. the size of the toolkit is problematic. I mean there's no intrinsic size for a development toolkit, but I don't know anyone who'd say 60GBs of data is a small development toolkit when as others have pointed out, there are older versions of the same Windows toolchains that still complete the same function and manage to take a fraction of the space...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

CuriousCosmic 4y ago

There's tooling that mostly avoids this. https://github.com/Jake-Shadle/xwin https://github.com/Jake-Shadle/xwin This is a utility that fixes a lot of the cross-compiling issues for windows by giving you a portable, unfucked naming, and not-massive SDK. It's the same SDK you get when you install MSVC but it's only a few hundred megs and the names are consistent even with all of Windows' fucked up tooling. The only caveat is you need to provide your own compiler, in this case clang is often the best option.

navjack27 4y ago

How is that too big for an SSD? My computer is ALL SSDs. What kind of shit drives u buying?