[phillipcarter]

I'm not sure what your environment looks like, but the .NET runtime is not even close to hundreds of MB in size. Unless you distributed a large amount of resources in your self-contained distribution (e.g., many massive images) would it come close to approaching that size.

A development environment includes the .NET SDK, shared framework, and NuGet packages. So that's going to be large in size. But you should never distribute the SDK with a published application. That's pushing a development environment onto a production machine.

[wyoung2]

Yes, you're right, I shouldn't use the development tree for my comparison here. The runtime-only .NET Core 2.1.3 installer for my platform is only (cough) 26.3 MB.

If you then try to get that lower by using self-contained builds, you can only get "Hello, world!" down to about 20 MB:

    $ dotnet new console --language f# -n hello
    $ cd hello
    ...add <RuntimeIdentifier>osx.10.13-x64</RuntimeIdentifier> to fsproj
    $ dotnet publish --self-contained -c release
    $ cd bin/release/netcoreapp2.1/osx.10.13-x64/publish
    $ rm -r ?? ??-?? zh-*                 # nuke i18n
    $ tar -cvJf ~/Desktop/hello.tar.xz .

You'll notice that I'm giving you the benefit of high compression here. The unpacked tree is 70 MB!

The equivalent in C++ is 3.3 kB.

I'm not expecting miracles. As I said, I'd be happy with "only" a 3x ballooning here, roughly commensurate with the coding efficiency benefit. That's fair.