haskell / haskell-platform

Distribution of Haskell with batteries included
http://www.haskell.org/platform/
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Haskell platform size #326

Closed ghost closed 5 years ago

ghost commented 5 years ago

Haskell platform size

I went to this page:

https://haskell.org/platform/windows.html

and I discovered that the download is 268 MB. This was surprising to me, so I looked at other languages:

Language Size Link
Go 118 MB https://golang.org/dl
Perl 102 MB http://strawberryperl.com/releases.html
R 80 MB https://cran.cnr.berkeley.edu/bin/windows/base
Julia 50 MB https://julialang.org/downloads
Python 25 MB https://python.org/downloads/release/python-373
PHP 25 MB https://windows.php.net/download
D 23 MB https://dlang.org/download.html
Ruby 11 MB https://rubyinstaller.org/downloads

So Haskell is more than double the size of Go. Or to put another way, Haskell is larger than R, Julia, Python, PHP, D and Ruby combined. Can anything be done about this or is the large size unavoidable?

gbaz commented 5 years ago

The platform installer certainly can't do anything about this, since it just packages up components from ghchq. I think in general this is just the way things are -- there's not just an interpreter and compiler, but a large number of prebuilt core libraries, each of which have all their profiling and debugging info included. So those take the size they take.