sudo apt-get install dmd

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On Sunday, 11 August 2019 at 11:40:18 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> Is it clear that either Snap or Flatpak are as efficient as 
> native packages in terms of space requirements, download time, 
> install time.

As a point of comparison, the ldc2 snap package is about 70 MB on 
disk.  The deb packages covering equivalent functionality would 
be:

   * ldc (14.2 MB)
   * libllvm5.0 (13.7 MB)
   * libphobos2-ldc-shared78 (8 MB)
   * libphobos2-ldc-shared-dev (56.7 MB)

... so if anything the snap package takes up slightly less space 
(with a difference being that of course the LLVM components it 
incorporates are for its own use only, not a shared library 
usable by the rest of the system).

Probably the major differentiator here is that snap packages use 
squashfs for storage, so the "true" size of the package is larger 
than the actual disk usage.  I think uncompressed the snap 
package would be about 290 MB, most of which is the compiler 
itself (66 MB) plus libraries (52 MB for 32-bit, 145 MB for 
64-bit).

Bear in mind that the snap package includes both 32- and 64-bit 
libs, in versions with and without debug symbols, whereas the deb 
packages only include 64-bit.  The snap package also includes LTO 
support (which accounts for about 45 MB of the total uncompressed 
lib size).

Bottom line, the snap package gives you a greater amount of 
functionality while using a smaller amount of actual disk space 
(thanks to squashfs).  And if we looked carefully at what is 
being included, it might be possible to reduce the size further.