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On a somewhat related note, why do so many open source projects give me a zip file with a single exe inside it instead of just the exe directly?
Because zipping it can reduce the size
2 MB to 1.95 MB, nice.
Plus a lot of antivirus whatevers will straight up block the downloading of *.exe
My antivirus is extra paranoid: it scans new files as soon as they're unzipped or as soon as I try to run them for the first time.
EXE files don't really compress well, plus the files should already be internally compressed when the exe is built.
This is true for the code part, but executables can also contain data does compress well and maybe not be compressed inside the EXE (e.g. - to avoid the need to decompress it on every run)
Well sure but most exes I download are installers, where decompression only needs to happen once.
I've been on Linux for so long, I already forgot about having to download a zip file with an installer that installs a downloader that downloads and installs the actual application.
A lot of exe files are secretly zip files. zip files can contain arbitrary data at the end of the file. exe files can have arbitrary data at the start of the file. It's a match made at Microsoft.