Rust binary sizes, once again

#1

Continuation of the discussion from https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/5198

My question was wether there would be any genuine issues / behabiour changes caused by stripping all release binaries by default?

IIRC, you might get worse stack traces?

Debuginfo isn’t on by default for release targets. C compilers don’t strip by default either.

With the important caveat that debug infor for stdlib is always there (because the same release+debuginfo build of stdlib is used for both debug and release).

Are you sure you get from 25MB to 3MB after strip on the release build?

Huge file size on resulting binary
#2

Sorry that size reduction was for a debug build. For a release build 6.5MB -> 1.6MB (with rocket, serde, wiringpi and pam-auth)

$ rm -f target/arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/release/rpitest; \
cargo build  --target arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf --release; \
mv target/arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/release/rpitest ./strip.off; \
rm -f target/arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/release/rpitest; \
cargo build  --target arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf --release; \
mv target/arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/release/rpitest ./strip.on; \
arm-none-eabi-strip strip.on;  \
ls -lh strip.on strip.off
   Compiling rpitest v0.1.0 (file:///Users/akos/projects/rust/tutorial)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 4.65 secs
   Compiling rpitest v0.1.0 (file:///Users/akos/projects/rust/tutorial)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 4.44 secs
-rwxr-xr-x  1 akos  staff   6.5M Mar 19 08:09 strip.off
-rwxr-xr-x  2 akos  staff   1.6M Mar 19 08:09 strip.on
#3

Seems like LTO doesn’t makes a difference only in the unstripped binary in this particular case:

-rwxr-xr-x  1 akos  staff   4.7M Mar 19 08:13 strip.off
-rwxr-xr-x  2 akos  staff   1.6M Mar 19 08:13 strip.on
#4

Oh, very interesting! I think this is https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/46034, that is, the bloat comes from debug symbols in stdlib.

#5

Latest nightly now has -Zstrip-debuginfo-if-disabled, which when set to yes will tell the linker to strip debuginfo during linking if debuginfo hasn’t been enabled.

#6 
$ rustc --version
rustc 1.26.0-nightly (188e693b3 2018-03-26)

$ cargo new hello && cd hello

$ cargo build --release && ls -lah target/release/hello
   Compiling hello v0.1.0 (file:///home/remmy/code/hello)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 0.33 secs
-rwxr-xr-x 2 remmy remmy 5.2M Mar 27 09:39 target/release/hello

$ RUSTFLAGS='-Zstrip-debuginfo-if-disabled=yes' cargo build --release && ls -lah target/release/hello
   Compiling hello v0.1.0 (file:///home/remmy/code/hello)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 0.27 secs
-rwxr-xr-x 2 remmy remmy 540K Mar 27 09:39 target/release/hello
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