When discussing the universal binaries, I'm not talking about the *installer*, which will of course contain multiple plugin formats, I'm talking about the actual plugin code itself, which contains essentially two (or more) copies of the program code to run on each applicable architecture.BONES wrote: Mon Jul 15, 2024 2:57 am Similarly, most Windows installers include both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of the plugin, as well as AAX and possibly also CLAP. Also, Mac installers were always bigger, long before Apple Silicon and right through the Intel years and after macOS dropped support for PPC, so that's not it.
So the VST3 format plugin has a binary that contains multiple architectures, and the AU format plugin has a binary that contains multiple architectures etc. There is no "similarly" on Windows - a program/plugin on Windows contains the X64 binary only, that's it. As many plugins wrap up the graphics etc into the binary and the binary is the bulk of the plugin size, on Mac, it's going to have a disk footprint of essentially twice the size as the PC version, that only has a binary for one architecture.
So in the case of these GF instruments, the reason the installer (which contains all plugin formats) is (nearly) twice the size on macOS compared to Windows, is because each individual plugin for each format inside the installer is twice the size compared to Windows, because each individual plugin contains two versions of the plugin code, one for Intel architectures, and one for Apple silicon architectures.
