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by Groxx 24 days ago
Kinda interestingly: it zips to 17MB, but the binary looks to be 56MB (davit.app/contents/macos/davit). That seems like a surprising amount of compression for a binary - embedded assets maybe? Possibly this is normal for mac apps though?
1 comments
Lalabadie 24 days ago
A lot of Mac apps compress like this. Not so long ago, it was pretty common to download a 3-400mb dmg file that decompresses to a 1.5gb app package, for example.
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Groxx 24 days ago
A lot of the time that happened, when I checked it was because a lot of the assets were relatively uncompressed, so DMG-compression shrank them considerably. I haven't noticed the binaries themselves being this compressible.

But that's just "noticed", I definitely haven't paid much attention. And don't have a mac nowadays, so I can't go check my hard drive now.

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Lalabadie 24 days ago
I'd lean the same way as you (just a hypothesis from me too). A .app on MacOS is just a special kind of directory, so the compression covers the normal file types inside of it.

Localization files compress well, compiled code compresses well, repeating assets (@1x, 2x, 3x) and the pair of binaries in a universal app (x86_64 + arm64) do too, etc.

Ah, and dmg compression is just LZFSE, zlib or bzip2, so pretty standard stuff as far as I understand it.

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