But why is it so big in the first place?

I was searching around for causes and came across the following issues: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/15358 which was moved to https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/30193

The following quotes stand out

> zig's caching system is designed explicitly so that garbage collection could happen in one process simultaneously while the cache is being used by another process.

> I just ran WizTree to find out why my disk was full, and the zig cache for one project alone was like 140 GB.

> not only the .zig-cache directory in my projects, but the global zig cache directory which is caching various dependencies: I'm finding each week I have to clear both caches to prevent run-away disk space

Like what's going on? This doesn't seem normal at all. I also read somewhere that zig stores every version of your binary as well? Can you shed some light on why it works like this in zigland?

AFAIK garbage collection is basically not implemented yet. I myself do `ZIG_LOCAL_CACHE_DIR=~/.cache/zig` so I only have to nuke single directory whenever I feel like it.