Distribution size of FStar

[kant2002]

I would like to start discussion of FStar compiler distribution size.
Currently package is 630 Mb or so. I build tooling to the F* for .NET land and publish compiler as Nuget, so developer did not deal with all that hassle.

I'm not familiar with Ocaml that much, and what I see where time is spend

fstar\lib\fstar\.cache\*.checked 136Mb
fstar\lib\fstar\lib\*.a 127Mb
fstar\lib\fstar\lib\*.cmi 6Mb
fstar\lib\fstar\lib\*.cmt 202Mb
fstar\lib\fstar\lib\*.cmxs 32Mb
fstar\lib\fstar\lib\*.cmx 5Mb
fstar\lib\fstar\lib\*.ml 5Mb

I understand that some of that definitely needed. But do other should be part of the package?

[kant2002]

As was suggested on Slack by @protz removal of CMT files help. I now able to pass Nuget package size threshold.

[mtzguido]

Thanks for bringing this up Andrii!

I tried some changes in a PR to remove the cmt files. With this, the tar.gz for a package drops to 203MB. I think the PR should be fine, but I'd like to research a bit more before merging. If you're building from source maybe you can try it out too?

[kant2002]

I try to simplify my life and use released zip and tar.gz for distribution. IMain problem was Windows distribution which is somehow significantly (larger). +300Mb unpacked. It’s zipped again by tooling (nature of Nuget)

so right now I just manually remove CMT files after unpacking.