From 2MB to 359MB isn’t turning it into a monstrosity? All programs becoming this big completely clogs my harddrive not leaving room for the movies I would like to shoot.
This really is not the place to learn why a program like Blender is not 2MB in size. You can download Blender as it is and it will use a few hundred megabytes of your hard drive. Or you can download gigabytes of sources and make your own of the same size. There isn’t some magical path that gets you a version of Blender that fits on a floppy disc.
2 Likes
It actually would be pretty neat if that thing was easily buildable…
According to “Blender for Dummies” the original program was 2MB big. When you check inside the Final Cut Pro package, the actual program is only 3.7MB big. A lot of space goes to plugin-bundles it doesn’t have nor use.
If you want to compile Blender then you have the link to do so. Otherwise this thread has become off-topic.
I still don’t have a list of everything I download when I click your links.
It would be, but It’ll never be, we build the libs we ship in svn in highly controlled environments and even that is a struggle, building all 104 (latest count for the 3.4 libs) external projects and blender easily without issues on every possible compiler / OS / local environment out there, would be an impressive feat. Not one realistically doable though.
The compromise we made by offering the 3rd party deps in SVN is the right choice, everyone can worry about contributing to blender, rather than pulling their hair our why dependency X is not playing nice with dependency Y when using compiler Z on OS… uhh… i’m out of letters… 
4 Likes
@Broke here is my understanding of things.
The best way to build Blender is to follow the steps detailed on the Blender developers website on how to build Blender. It’s set up to be relatively simple. Here is the website I am talking about: Building Blender - Blender Developer Wiki
During the process of “setting up the build environment” you will download multiple things. I will go through each step, using MacOS as an example:
Download the latest version of Xcode from the Mac App Store for your system
Xcode is a development tool provided by Apple available for download on the App Store.
brew install cmake svn
This makes use of the “Homebrew” command line tool to install cmake and svn. The source code (?) for it can be found here: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew
When using the Homebrew command to install cmake and svn, you will be downloading and installing a cmake and svn program and it’s dependancies. These apps are provided by someone (not sure who) with more information about the origins of the applications can be found on the Homebrew website. homebrew-core — Homebrew Formulae
What do the cmake and svn tools do?
cmake is useful in compiling applications (like Blender) and svn is used for downloading some extra stuff like external libraries during the setup of the Blender source code (I will talk about this later)
Do you need to use Homebrew to install these applications?
No. You can install them using a different method if you would like.
git clone https://git.blender.org/blender.git
This command uses the git tool to download a copy of the Blender source code. Keep in mind, this is primarily the Blender source code. Extra code for features offered by external libraries, such as file compression is not included in this download, it comes at a later step.
You can view the source code that will be downloaded by visiting the https://git.blender.org/ website then clicking on blender.git then tree at the top of the screen.
This website, also run by the Blender developers, provides what I personally think is a nicer UI for viewing what will be downloaded. Blender · rB
make update
Thi runs a series of commands to update the source code. For example, it uses git to update the Blender source code to the latest version. And it uses svn to download and update the external libraries I’ve mentioned earlier.
If we look at the Linux install instructions, we can actually see what the svn command looks like:
svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/linux_centos7_x86_64
If you want to go look at which libraries will be downloaded, you can go to that website and look at your operating system to see what will be downloaded: bf-blender - Revision 63003: /trunk/lib
Note: Darwin is the name used for MacOS
This site, also run by the Blender developers provides an alternative UI to look at the libraries folder: Blender Libraries · rBL
So, what does this libraries folder contain? It contains a bunch of external libraries that Blender uses. For example, Intel Embree for the BVH in Cycles. zstd, used for compressing .blend files (when compression is enabled), ffmpeg to handle video encoding (and decoding?) in Blender, etc.
All? of these projects are open-source. And if you don’t trust the Blender developers to have built these libraries safely, then you can build them yourself. This is done by running the make deps command while in the Blender source code folder. This will download the source code for each respective project, apply any modifications the Blender foundation needs for it to work how they want for Blender, and compiles it.
This will require quite a bit of time to setup and get fully functional. But it can be done. There’s also probably an extra step I’m missing.
All (or most?) of the files used for downloading the source code for these libraries and applying patches to them before compiling them can be found in the build_files folder of the Blender source code. And you can view each one before using the make deps command if you don’t trust the Blender developers to have maliciously tampered with the source code of the external libraries.
Basically, almost everything used for compiling Blender is open source, and you can find the source code for them and the steps to obtain each in the right places.
I say “almost everything” as some tools, such as Xcode on MacOS, aren’t (fully?) open source.
Do you need everything, all the Blender source code, all the libraries, to build Blender?
No. You can skip large parts if you want to build a simplified version of Blender (for example, Blender lite), and you can even skip some smaller things if you want to build a full version of Blender (for example, the Open Path Guiding Library is included in the libraries folder, but isn’t used yet (This feature is currently under development))
6 Likes
I can read. I’m asking for a list of file dependencies.
I don’t like that the provided makefile (1) is difficult to read and (2) stresses the use of cmake.
Other than that, if Blender would stick to its own graphics library, implementing polygons and such for itself, it would be way smaller than with openGL. openGL and other open source libraries aren’t positive. They just dramatically increase the size of your program.
Ouch… That would require to write specific code for each and every graphic card available in the market… implementing polygons would just be a cherry on the top of an enormous (if not impossible) cake to bake.
5 Likes
The original programmer of Blender did it. From Blendernation:
It’s not difficult. The complexity is handled by the computer. That’s the whole point of using computers. You defineth one object and per your request the computer maketh many instances of said object, linking them all together.
Please don’t talk like an expert about things you obviously know nothing about…
4 Likes
wow 
get this man a foundation grant, we need to reimplement polygons
4 Likes
I would like to remind everyone to please keep the discussion polite and respectful, even when there are apparent differences of opinions or factually incorrect statements being made.
1 Like
Click the link to the article on Blender 1.0: Blender was only 2MB.
Including all of the libraries that you’ve included made the program huge, not the basic necessities of 3D animation.
in no case do not tell him that Maya in its installed form weighs several gigabytes… I installed, checked, version - 2019.1
So? Two wrongs don’t make a right.
3ds max weighs about twice as much as Maya… I think Cinema4D has the same situation. The only thing that weighs small is specialized programs that focus strictly on one area (texturing, clothing, etc) but by “small”, I mean a size approximately in the range of a gigabyte or more. so you’re saying that everyone is stupid?
1 Like
Correct. They aren’t hiring the right people for the job. If you want people that are able, you need people that enjoy typing and enjoy structuring and maintaining structure. Those are the people that are great at programming. They don’t just throw everything into one basket and say, “It’s going to work, because it has to.” They keep it efficient. They consider programming to be a challenge. They - are called secretaries.