Why does Makie take some much hard drive space?

[maximilian-gelbrecht]

First off, great work with Makie. I really like using for almost all my plotting needs in Julia.

I just have one major problem with it: The hard drive space it takes. At the moment on my installation Makie + CairoMakie across Julia 1.10, 1.11 and 1.12 takes in total 8 GB of hard drive storage just in the .julia/compiled folder. This seems excessive to me, is there some way you could reduce that?

[jkrumbiegel]

That does indeed sound like a lot. Is that a single version per julia version?

[maximilian-gelbrecht]

No, it's a few different versions each. I think 6 for 1.10 and 1.11 and 2 for 1.12? I am not sure how to count the files as some seem related.

I think in general Julia tends to really bloat on the hard drive, and for me Makie is the library that takes by far the most hard drive space at the moment.

[jkrumbiegel]

Makie has a lot of code, the precompilation files can only be smaller if code is removed from them or something in Julia is optimized. I think in recent history, precompilation files have only been getting bigger in Julia. And it's difficult to say what the "right" amount of code to precompile is. Maybe we do too much currently, on the other hand, everything we don't precompile is slower at the start.