Should not be necessary. It's just wrong to have a whole app dedicated to cleaning up after Apple's Lazy Ass.

It isn't necessary, caches are deleted automatically. You just don't have low enough disk space to need it deleted.

(This doesn't necessarily apply to apps who don't put things in Caches folders…)

Except Xcode can't possibly know before hand when I do need the space back. Let's say I have 10GB free, so Xcode says "Well, you just don't have low enough disk space to need it deleted" while I'm trying to install Premiere Pro that requires 30GB of space (just an example), but I can't, because I don't have enough disk space.

How about not trying to guess when the user needs the space?

This is the same problem I have with the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" argument. So long as a system has a maximum of one application using this strategy, it works. As soon as you have two independent programs each of which try to cache as much as possible, it falls apart.

For a while, the browser could reasonably assume that it was the only application that used this strategy, and it was a true assumption. Now that native executables are being replaced by web-based applications, every program is trying to maximize its RAM usage, with predictable results.

It works fine if they tell the VM that its cache regions are purgeable, so they just go away under pressure instead of getting swapped out.

Of course getting swapped out is usually fine too.

Huge memory usage is more likely because they don’t know how to check for memory leaks, not because they’re trying to use it.

How’s the “I can’t” work? If the installer is telling you it can’t that just means it’s checking for free disk space the wrong way.

The fact there’s a right way and wrong way to check free disk space is a problem in the first place.

Pretty classic problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of-check_to_time-of-use

Similar assumptions about filesystems fail if they do data compression or dedupe files - you can easily overestimate how much space something is taking.

Ah. Ok that makes more sense.

There is a tool in the MacOS that will find large sized apps and allow you to delete them.

But we already know what the large tool is, and it can be a dependency for other languages when using natively compiled libraries.

What is the tool ?

Apple Menu > About This Mac > Storage > (Volume Name) > [Manage...]

DaisyDisk is one of them

Apple has added a thing in Ventura (?) to list and let you remove these files.

Does it have a name?

Apple Menu > About This Mac > Storage > (Volume Name) > [Manage...]

I don't know the name, but IIRC it's something like "disk usage". It resembles roughly the "storage" panel on iOS.

On macOS 12 it's part of the System Information app at least and called "Storage Management"

I'm pretty sure it was there before, my 2013 mbp is too old to run the latest version, and I've seen it there, too.

It was in Monterey too and maybe earlier.

At least since Yosemite. I used it a lot in college when I was using a 128gb MacBook.

The developer section is definitely newer than that…

Holy crap. Thank you for that pointer and my 92GBs of newly free space.