boost libraries size = 10.9GB?

Question

I've compliled BOOST "boost_1_55_0" with visual studio

Source size is about 473 MB, after the build I got a 10.9 GB folder...

Is it normal ? This is more than windows 7 size...

Thanks.

Answer 1

This is normal.

It's big because you build all variants, and the intermediate files for all variants are kept (with all debug information). This is very helpful for incremental rebuilds with small changes (e.g. when doing development on a boost library), beause it will only build targets that are out of date.

Now, it's not bigger than Windows 7. Last time I checked, windows 7 64-bit clocked 30GiB on a clean installation. I happen to know, because I used to have SSDs of 30GiB :|

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Update Linux Figures:

By the way, on my linux box my boost trees are 0.5-1GiB in size, but that's because I use --build-dir=/tmp/build-boost while building (and maybe it doesn't build quite as many variants on linux, by default).

The boost-modular tree is 1.3GiB on linux (or 1.7GiB on a 'well-worn' one that has been used to build several different versions).