I shaved off 10 MiB from my binary in 2 hours!

I made a program using Macroquad, then I built it in release mode, the binary was 63 MiB in size.

So I used cargo vendor to have a better look at Macroquad and one of its dependencies, glam.

I then started to delete code, like, lots and lots of code(about 30_000 lines of code); none of it affected my main project, some of it became 'dead_code' just by removing the pub keyword.

The result is that my project was unaffected and the binary went down to 52 MiB.

Is there a way to automate removal of unneeded elements from dependencies? This is potentially huge.

EDIT: I FIGURED IT OUT!!!

My mistake was measuring the size of "target/release", I discovered that that folder contains many "unnecessary" files, like "deps", which greatly bloat the folder'r size, the actual size of my binary is 864K.

I am so relieved.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Actually, dead code eliminination should do the trick, if you're compiling a binary at least (same for a library I think, but there could be re-exports there). Did you compile in release mode?

  • source
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    To expand: Just configure whatever profile you're using (dev, release, ...) to have link time optimization (lto) enabled:

    [profile.release]
    lto = "fat"
    

    Reference

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    The compiler doesn't consider it to be dead code since it's marked pub.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments