Mickeon
commented
2 years ago With the "destringification" that has been happening in Godot 4, I can see something like this becoming closer and closer to reality, but it would still prove outstandingly difficult to implement. Godot is a dynamic language. It's possible to connect signals with Strings(Object.connect()), it's possible to call methods through Strings (Object.call() & Object.call_deferred()). If the associated methods were to just disappear in the release build?
How could such a system be able to tell what to strip away in the following, albeit very niche, cases?
var method_name = "show" if condition else "hide"
call(method_name)
call(LIST_OF_RANDOM_METHODS)
bfelbo
KoBeWi
YuriSizov
Calinou
Describe the project you are working on
Many small HTML5 and iOS/Android games, where it's crucial to have fast download and load times.
Describe the problem or limitation you are having in your project
Godot has an ever-growing bundle of amazing functionality, which is hugely helpful for making games. However, most of this functionality is not used, leading to bloated game bundles that take longer for the player to download. For instance, even the simplest HTML5 games made with Godot need 15 MB for the engine, whereas the game logic and assets might only be 2-3 MB.
These simple games can also take 10+ seconds to load on old devices because the device has to load a lot of unneeded functionality into memory. This will likely become an increasingly important issue as more functionality is added to Godot.
Describe the feature / enhancement and how it helps to overcome the problem or limitation
Add tree-shaking functionality to the compiler so only the part of the Godot engine that are actually used by the game are included. This would dramatically reduce size and load times.
Describe how your proposal will work, with code, pseudo-code, mock-ups, and/or diagrams
This would work similar to webpack's tree-shaking in that Godot would identify which functions are being used and remove the rest from the exported bundle.
This is similar to disabling 3D mentioned in the docs, but more refined and with much bigger benefit because it would disable lots of other unused functionality besides 3D. That being said, it might be cool to just do a simple initial version that just automatically detects if 3D is used and disables it otherwise.
Implementing tree-shaking would likely take quite a bit of effort, but would improve the bundle size and load time of every single game exported with Godot (there’s no game that uses all the functionality).
If this enhancement will not be used often, can it be worked around with a few lines of script?
No.
Is there a reason why this should be core and not an add-on in the asset library?
AFAIK this would only be possible to do in core.