The .NET Core SDK is significantly smaller with .NET Core 3.0. The primary reason is that we changed the way we construct the SDK, by moving to purpose-built “packs” of various kinds (reference assemblies, frameworks, templates). In previous versions (including .NET Core 2.2), we constructed the SDK from NuGet packages, which included many artifacts that were not required and wasted a lot of space.
The following sections demonstrate the size improvements for Windows, Linux and macOS, including container delivery. They detail the process and commands that were used to determine the product sizes, enabling you to reproduce the same results in your own environment. To keep thing simple, zips and tar balls were downloaded from dotnet/core-sdk as opposed to the official installers.
Some readers will be shocked on how large the .NET Core 2.2 installer directory grows when the NuGetFallback archive is expanded to the NuGetFallBackFolder. W