Is there a way to minimise size of Kotlin/Native program binaries?

# kotlin-native

[Dmitry Kandalov]

Is there a way to minimise size of Kotlin/Native program binaries?

[Dmitry Kandalov]

E.g. on osx hello world is ~700kb. With konanc -opt flag it’s even bigger.

[Dmitry Kandalov]

It’s also interesting that strings program.kexe shows paths to teamcity agent /opt/teamcity-agent/work/...

[thevery]

^that's jetbrains teamcity and I guess it's by design

[Deactivated User]

What about strip program.kexe?

That would cut 100~300kb a from hello world release/debug builds. Also you usually distribute things compressed. After a release build for macos + strip, a 7z file with the binary is ~142kb. You can also use UPX to get similar results (189kb) in the final exe:
upx program.kexe

[Dmitry Kandalov]

Hm, why hello world needs to know about teamcity? 🤔

[Dmitry Kandalov]

Yes, strip will minimize program size to about 400kb. I was wondering why the file is still quite big (I guess it's kotlin stdlib) and if there is some other optimisation.

[Deactivated User]

Well, probably it uses the __FILE__ macro for debugging purposes somehow and includes those strings since the stdlib was built using teamcity. You can compile your own kotlin-native in a shorter path and use it 🙂

But yeah, think that it is not even 1.0, so no much attention on that kind of optimizations has been done yet. Before 1.0 usually the idea is to get it right.

My bet is that the size is related to some runtime stuff still not being optimized/stripped because a lack of other optimizations.