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I wonder if there are any plans to rewrite the desktop client in C++ (with some Objective-C++ on Mac), presumably using the libdropbox C++ libraries that Dropbox has been developing for the mobile apps, to get the installer size down and leverage more common code across platforms.

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Not currently, unfortunately. The complexity of how the Dropbox client works is enough to not pollute libdropbox with at this time. The idea here is correct though - were we to rebuild it at this time, we would look at potentially abstracting a lot things into a libdropbox-like library

I'm surprised you haven't tried harder to optimise the download size ... the blog post says it ships a nearly full Python runtime, but surely you don't actually use it all? The core interpreter is I'd think quite small and Python code should compress very well.

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