If your Mac's disk filled up and you traced it to ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.coresymbolicationd, you're not alone. On a developer's Mac this one folder can quietly grow to 50, 80, even 100 GB or more.
coresymbolicationd is a macOS system daemon. It caches debug symbols so crash reports, stack traces and profiling tools can turn memory addresses back into function names. That process is called symbolication.
It adds to the cache every time you build in Xcode, attach a debugger or symbolicate a crash log. Apple never expires the cache, so it doesn't shrink on its own. It just keeps growing until you notice your disk is full.
Only macOS has this daemon, so this is a Mac developer problem. Windows and Linux don't build up anything like it.
Yes. It's a cache, and it rebuilds automatically. The only cost is that symbolication may be a little slower the first few times afterward, while the cache fills back in. Your code, projects and Xcode settings aren't stored there.
In Terminal:
du -sh ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.coresymbolicationd~/Library/Caches/com.apple.coresymbolicationd.Or in Terminal, which deletes the folder's contents immediately and skips the Trash:
rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.coresymbolicationd/*Either way, it starts growing again the next time you build or debug.
SymbolSweep is a menu bar app that watches this cache and clears it automatically once it passes a size you choose. It only ever deletes inside ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.coresymbolicationd, and it logs every deletion.
It also finds the other things filling a developer's disk, like Xcode DerivedData, node_modules, Rust target folders and package manager caches, and shows you which are safe to delete.
Free to scan. $12 once to clean, for one Mac. No subscription. Requires macOS 13 or later on Apple silicon.