There's a scale of developers: from people who regularly do this sort of thing, to people who are more casual about it. That's the type of audience that I like to write for sometimes: they'll use my library (which may use compiled code), but they haven't been exposed to this area of software development before. Designers are the best stereotype for this. Having a massive Xcode install is what I'm saying is detrimental to these sorts of casual users (a lot of the time it wouldn't be appropriate to call them "progammers", really).

It's friction, but, really. It came with their computer. You click a bunch of buttons and it's installed. The size of the install is irrelevant.

But I still have difficulty believing these casual-developers-but-not-programmers exist in great numbers. Have people told you "I was going to try your thing, but it asked for this weird gcc thing"?

Absolutely. I run into that frequently with my own projects. It's such a bummer to have to tell someone to go through this whole process for such a small `gem install` command.