@forrestthewoods yes! And, packaging up things like “visual studio” etc is not even that massive. IIRC at Unity I had that in like 200MB without even trying hard. This is for old version, but idea the same https://gist.github.com/aras-p/e5df1b7a3374b99ae31f053b14403d92

@forrestthewoods @aras hmm .. that works? I would've expected visual studio to set all kinds of archaic registry stuff that would make it not function if not "properly" installed
interesting

@logicalerror @forrestthewoods that’s what we did at Unity, so worked at least there :)

@forrestthewoods @aras you mean on the server side? I never noticed visual studio in the unity repo? (certainly didn't look for it though)
do you mean it would've compiled even I hadn't installed visual studio? 🤔

@logicalerror @forrestthewoods yes (since 2018 or so). That’s about the first thing “how to setup build environment” docs used to say. And even then, I had to explain to people over and over again that no, changing your local VS install version will not affect the build one iota.

@logicalerror @forrestthewoods …and yes VS toolchain and Win10 SDK were in the repo itself, under PlatformDependent somewhere

@forrestthewoods @aras huh how about that.. left unity 2 years ago and still learning new things about its build system 😂

@aras @forrestthewoods but pretty cool that's possible .. but I'm guessing due to licensing this can't be done in an open source project
was xcode part of the build system too?

@logicalerror @forrestthewoods yes. Not Xcode the IDE, but the compiler + platform SDK bits for Mac and iOS, yes. Same for Android etc.

@forrestthewoods @aras nice, android I expected since it's open source, didn't expect the commercial compilers though
I guess this partially explains unity never open sourcing its source 😂

@logicalerror @forrestthewoods that’s NOT why. All these were already properly stripped for source code customers, and there the build system does fallback to system-installed toolchains. Open source (if it ever happened) would have used exact same approach.