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.

  • DoodsOP
    1·
    2 months ago

    Yes, I am using both LTO and release mode, I can show you:

    [profile.release]
opt-level = 3
codegen-units = 1
panic = "abort"
strip = true
lto = true

    cargo build --release

      • DoodsOP
        2·
        2 months ago

        Should I bring it up to the ‘min-sized-rust’ working group or the forums or something?

        • TehPers@beehaw.orgEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          Yes. This behavior seems strange, so either an explanation or investigation by a compiler dev seems like it would be helpful.

          • DoodsOP
            2·
            2 months ago

            Just so you know I figured it out, re-read the post please.