Why does building cardano-node require unreasonable amounts of disk space?

Question

What is the reason behind the build process with nix requiring so much disk space when building cardano-node?

I totally understand when video games with 4K videos, high resolution textures, large trained neural networks etc take a lot of space. But shouldn't it just be "code" for cardano-node? Are there any big non-code assets or is there a lot of code duplication? (and anything which can be done about it besides buying a larger disk?)

Building with cabal seems to use a bit less space, but it's still GB's.

Answer 1

When using Nix, you need to download and install a huge amount of Nix related stuff that is not required if you are not using Nix.

I am sure you have heard the expression "the only reason I have seen so far is because I am standing on the shoulders of giants". This is also true for Cardano, which stands on the shoulders of a huge number of libraries.

There are a small number of assests like PDF files, but if you look in the git repos, you will see that they are well over 95% code. However, when you install Nix you are installing binaries (for everything down to the most obvious executables like ls).