[palaiologos]

The source code is 150 megabytes, so you wouldn't be able to read it without downloading it either way.

It compresses well (down to, if i remember correctly, 3 megabytes), so this is the preferred way of distributing the program.

[Null-Set]

Git will compress the objects it stores, so checking in compressed objects is usually redundant.

[spijdar]

That may be so, but GitHub has an individual file limit of 100MB, and practically speaking, most people don't want/expect to open a 150 MB text file in their browsers, so I think this is a good compromise (though it might be worth being extra clear in the readme that the malbolge source is in the archive)

[palaiologos]

Quoting the readme: > What is inside the zip file? > The release bundle includes interpreter binaries [...]. malbolgelisp-v1.1.mb is the source code for the interpreter.

[spijdar]

The way I parsed that when I first read it, I took it to mean that the filename of the lisp interpreter was "malbolgelisp-v1.1.mb" and was somewhere else in the repo, not in the 7zip archive with the interpreter binaries. I see what it means now, but the two ideas felt disjointed on my first reading.

[masklinn]

> Git will compress the objects it stores

Only when they get packed, and it doesn't exactly help when github will reject individual objects larger than 100MB inflated.

[globular-toast]

Thanks for the answer. No thanks to the >= 3 people who decided to downvote my question.