Why is Erlang so large?

[Per Hedeland]

James Hague <jhague@REDACTED> wrote:
>The tar.gz file for the latest Open Source Erlang release is close to 7 
>megabytes.  Why so large?  7 MB of zipped source code is _huge_.

Yeah, there's a lot of source code in there...:-)

>This is more for curiosity's sake than a real complaint :) though it 
>would be nice to have a smaller core download, with add-ons for mnesia 
>and such.

Well, there was some discussion of this before the release, and
basically the consensus was that 7 MB wasn't too bad in this day and age
(the current distribution of emacs is 14 MB, and gcc is 12 MB:-), and
that it would be an acceptable way to avoid the hassle of dealing with
multiple packages (at both ends - it may be confusing for users to
figure out what they need too). But maybe the decision should be
reconsidered...

--Per Hedeland
per@REDACTED