My ELFs are so big

eekee · **Posted:** Mon Jan 22, 2024 8:31 am

AndrewAPrice wrote:

GUI programs link with Skia which adds a dependency on libxml2, harfbuzz, freetype, libjpeg.

I woke up this morning recalling a 9front discussion in which a leading dev concluded that you need dynamic linking for GUI. (This was years ago now, opinions may have changed.) Some time after that discussion, a GUI server came to light. The concept was simple: The program (or even shell script) starts the GUI server, sending and receiving messages over the server's stdio. This certainly shrinks program binares. It's enough to save some memory on a statically-linked system; the text section of the GUI server is shared between all instances. Further savings could be made if the server were a single instance; font caching comes to mind.

AndrewAPrice · **Posted:** Wed Jan 24, 2024 9:13 am

thewrongchristian wrote:

Interesting. What made the difference in the end? Was it just recompiling with clang? Or did you end up stripping the resulting binaries?

I switched to Clang and got linked time optimization working.

the wrongchristian wrote:

Fair enough, but it's unlikely all of that 8MB is actually mapped in. You only need to map in the code that is executed (assuming demand paging), so if the bulk of the files was debug symbols that got removed, then you'll have saved little in the way of memory usage.

My ELF loading code doesn't do demand paging and copies any segment where p_type == PT_LOAD and p_filesz >= 0.

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My ELFs are so big

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