I'm being a little bit ridiculous, but most people I know run it overnight. I did an install recently and several hours was correct for the IDE + data science pack. Put another way, I could install Haskell, Python, Ruby, Perl, Free Pascal, Dyalog APL, Nim, Elixir, Julia, and a few more with time to spare. Granted, the data science pack in VS comes with R and Anaconda Python, but still it is insanely big by almost any standard. I think at that point it's time to take a step back and evaluate modern programming practices (after I uninstall a bunch of junk ;)).

Could a .NET expert break it down for me why VS takes the size and memory it does. I know why VS Code needs 150 MB of RAM (JavaScript), but VS should be written in C++ right?