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.
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?
To expand: Just configure whatever profile you’re using (
dev,release, …) to have link time optimization (lto) enabled:Reference
This really doesn’t seem to do the trick, the binary’s still at 63MiB.
Also
"fat"andtrueare identical.Edit: I’m not sure I replied to the right person, ignore this.
I don’t recall what the default behavior is with the linker, but it might also benefit from at least thin LTO.
The compiler doesn’t consider it to be dead code since it’s marked
pub.Sure, but isn’t this in a dependency? Can’t be reached when only importing your crate anyways? And if you’re building a binary, I don’t think this could really considered exported, is what I mean :)
Yes that’s exactly what I want. The compiler should stop considering it accessible.