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Amjad50 / plastic

NES emulator in rust with egui and TUI
MIT License
299 stars 12 forks source link

Enable Link-Time Optimization (LTO) once again #10

Closed zamazan4ik closed 3 days ago

zamazan4ik commented 3 days ago

Hi!

I noticed that in the Cargo.toml file Link-Time Optimization (LTO) for the project is not enabled. I suggest switching it on since it will reduce the binary size (always a good thing to have) and will likely improve the application's performance a bit.

I suggest enabling LTO only for the Release builds so as not to sacrifice the developers' experience while working on the project since LTO consumes an additional amount of time to finish the compilation routine. If you think that a regular Release build should not be affected by such a change as well, then I suggest adding an additional dist or release-lto profile where additionally to regular release optimizations LTO will also be added. Such a change simplifies life for maintainers and others interested in the project persons who want to build the most performant version of the application. Using ThinLTO should also help to reduce the build-time overhead with LTO. If we enable it on the Cargo profile level, users, who install the application with cargo install, will get the LTO-optimized version "automatically". E.g., check cargo-outdated Release profile.

Basically, it can be enabled with the following lines:

[profile.release]
lto = true

I see that LTO was disabled 4 years ago due to some build issues. I think after such a period of time we can reconsider enabling this compiler option. I made some quick tests on my local machine (Fedora 40, AMD Ryzen 9 5900x): lto = true reduces the plastic binary size from 17 Mib to 13 Mib (I didn't perform a performance comparison though) - quite a good result!

Thank you.

Amjad50 commented 3 days ago

Thanks for the suggestion you are correct.