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by jerf 2652 days ago
Not having a lot of disk space is a minority case for developers now. I wouldn't hold your breath for the Go authors to address it.

If you have a disk space problem, Nix would seem to be the opposite of the solution to that. One of the ways Nix does its magic is to chew through disk space a lot more freely than most distros do.
2 comments
fiatjaf 2651 days ago
Also, there are a lot of people who think disk space is an issue. See https://pnpm.js.org/ for example.

(Ironically, pnpm doesn't have an auto cleanup feature.)

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jerf 2651 days ago
npm was especially broken with disk space, above and beyond what Go has ever had, so their problem was much worse.

And my point is not that disk space is never an issue. That's why I said it was a minority issue, not "not an issue". My point is more than Go is not a language about addressing every fiddly minority's issues. It's definitely about the 20% that does 80% of the work. So waiting for a language lead by a philosophy like that to address a disk space issue is probably not a good plan.

To be a bit more constructive, I'd observe I've had great experiences with cross-compiling. On the chance you're disk-space limited because you're developing right on a target resource-constrained device, you may be able to move your development to a more powerful system, even of a different architecture, and cross-compile fairly easily. I often have a workflow where I just "go build blahblahblah && rsync blahblahblah target:blahblahblah && ssh target blahblahblah" and I just press up & enter on a shell when I want to push & test the code. As long as you've got half-decent bandwidth to the target device, it's fine. There may be a couple of other buttons you may want to push to speed that up, because IIRC when cross-compiling it'll end up building the entire app, and you'll want to pre-compile things for the new arch.

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fiatjaf 2651 days ago
But it has automatic and safe cleanup, right? So I can use only what I need at any point in time instead of having an opaque directory full of unused stuff I don't know if I can delete or not.
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