macos: remove CoreFoundation dependency?

[bnoordhuis]

Commit b1741ea1fadf from 2014 claims -framework CoreFoundation is necessary to make the Heap Allocations recorder in Instruments work properly.

In my limited testing I didn't spot a difference with or without CoreFoundation. I'm not invested enough in macOS to dig deeper but maybe someone wants to verify and open a pull request. Removing it should save some startup time.

[bnoordhuis]

Forgot to mention, CoreFoundation is together with libSystem and libc++ one of only three start-up dependencies and at 20 MB it's by far the most massive of the bunch. Transitively it pulls in 53 MB of shared libraries.

For comparison: libSystem's and libc++'s transitive footprints together are < 12 MB.

$ for LIB in `otool -L $(which node)|grep current|awk '{print $1}'`; do wc -c `otool -L $LIB|grep current|awk '{print $1}'`; echo; done
 20808624 /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Versions/A/CoreFoundation
 28112240 /usr/lib/libobjc.A.dylib
   57376 /usr/lib/libDiagnosticMessagesClient.dylib
 6805664 /usr/lib/libicucore.A.dylib
  186480 /usr/lib/libz.1.dylib
   61408 /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
 56031792 total

   61408 /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
   83936 /usr/lib/system/libcache.dylib
  193424 /usr/lib/system/libcommonCrypto.dylib
  161280 /usr/lib/system/libcompiler_rt.dylib
  136960 /usr/lib/system/libcopyfile.dylib
 1185792 /usr/lib/system/libcorecrypto.dylib
  828656 /usr/lib/system/libdispatch.dylib
  605024 /usr/lib/system/libdyld.dylib
   44512 /usr/lib/system/libkeymgr.dylib
   58704 /usr/lib/system/liblaunch.dylib
   99264 /usr/lib/system/libmacho.dylib
   73520 /usr/lib/system/libquarantine.dylib
   57808 /usr/lib/system/libremovefile.dylib
  297920 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_asl.dylib
   44176 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_blocks.dylib
 1437088 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_c.dylib
   84336 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_configuration.dylib
   77168 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_coreservices.dylib
  136208 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_darwin.dylib
  102016 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_dnssd.dylib
  804064 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_info.dylib
  755200 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_m.dylib
  408784 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_malloc.dylib
  182304 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_networkextension.dylib
  110528 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_notify.dylib
   85104 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_sandbox.dylib
   67152 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_secinit.dylib
  546768 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_kernel.dylib
  141568 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_platform.dylib
  171856 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_pthread.dylib
  117136 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_symptoms.dylib
  295696 /usr/lib/system/libsystem_trace.dylib
  112544 /usr/lib/system/libunwind.dylib
  656224 /usr/lib/system/libxpc.dylib
 10224128 total

 1432816 /usr/lib/libc++.1.dylib
  339520 /usr/lib/libc++abi.dylib
   61408 /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
 1833744 total

[evanlucas]

There definitely is a difference from what I am seeing with and without CoreFoundation on macOS 12.6 (Kernel 21.6.0)

Screenshot with CoreFoundation:

Screenshot without CoreFoundation:

With CoreFoundation, I am able to actually see a stack trace

I did run some benchmarks and could not find a noticeable difference in startup performance though. I wonder if that is due to the dyld shared cache. It does also look like most dependencies of CoreFoundation are weakly linked. idk if it is helpful and doesn't have a performance impact, I'd say we should likely keep it around, since it's quite useful when using Instruments

[bnoordhuis]

Thanks for investigating. I'll go ahead and close this then.