Reduce the binary size

[kvark]

See https://twitter.com/batmansmk/status/1346479574465433613 A simple app got compiled to an 1.3Mb executable. I'm sure we can do better!

[cwfitzgerald]

This is espcially important on wasm/webgl, where the blob has to be shipped over the wire. Currently our examples, built in release, sit at about 5-6MB uncompressed.

[maxammann]

I can confirm this for WebGL builds. Not for builds which use WebGPU. I'm currently at 1.6Mb uncompressed (Gziped its 571k.). The reason for this could also be that winit, web-sys or js-sys introduces this issue. I haven't debugged the root cause so far.

Steps I've completed so far:

• Build in release profile
• Enable optimizations for release profile:

  [profile.release]
  lto = true
  codegen-units = 1
  opt-level = 's'
  

• Run wasm-opt
• Disabling unused features like "x11", "wayland" for winit

Further ideas: https://rustwasm.github.io/book/reference/code-size.html

I think that the uncompressed size should be below 1Mb, else the compilation on the client side could be a real bottleneck (CPU fans spin up etc.). In comparison for WebGPU my build size is already 708k without compression (compressed its down to 222k).

[maxammann]

@kvark did you use the WebGL backend or WebGPU?

[kvark]

I didn't measure either, just linked to a tweet.

[maxammann]

I didn't measure either, just linked to a tweet.

I might do some better reproducible measurements soon :) Something that would be awesome would be a CI step which validates that WASM builds are not exploding in size. If the size of the wasm file doubles for example with the introduction of a commit then there is a serious problem.

[cwfitzgerald]

This has no particular actionability, so I'm going to close.