macOS disk space after Update to R2020b

Today I updated my Matlab installation from 2020a to R2020b and I am confused about how this affects my available disk space on my computer.

Here is what I have done:

0) Check available disk space: 66 GB

1) Install R2020b with the same toolboxes that I had with R2020a

2) Drag R2020a to the trash and empty it

3) Update XCode through the App Store (still in progress, extremely slow as always)

4) Check available disk space: 30 GB (still decreasing due to XCode update)

I run macOS 10.15 on a mid 2014 MacBook Pro.

Almost certainly will I have a little more disk space after XCode is done but I cannot imagine it taking up 36 GB even temporarily. I also cannot imagine a significant increase in disk space needed for R2020b compared to R2020a. Furthermore this problem remindes me of the last time upgrading my Matlab install. I somehow believe that I had the same problem but ignored it after a while. Is there still an old Matlab install floating around somewhere and taking up so much space? Why is it that everytime I upgrade Matlab, I loose many GBs of my disk space, even though I uninstall the previous version? Or is it XCode that is to blame here? Should I try to uninstall XCode completely and try I clean install?

Answer 1

[fixusc]

It seems that the root of my problem was indeed XCode. After a clean install, my disk space went up to 54 GB again. So still 12 GB lost somewhere but that's probably due to the size increase of XCode and Matlab.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

You should be looking at:

~/Documents/MATLAB/Examples            %examples you loaded at some point and might not need
~/Documents/MATLAB/SupportPackages     %contains installed version-specific packages you could clean
~/Downloads/Mathworks/SupportPackages  %contains downloaded version-specific packages you could clean
~/Downloads/Mathworks/Toolboxes        %contains downloaded "add-on explorer" packages you could clean
~/Downloads/Mathworks/R*               %cached downloaded installation packages you could clean