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mvdnes / rboy

A Gameboy Emulator in Rust
MIT License
607 stars 39 forks source link

Enable Link-Time Optimization (LTO) #29

Closed zamazan4ik closed 1 month ago

zamazan4ik commented 1 month 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 E.g., check cargo-outdated Release profile.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 have made quick local tests (Rustc 1.81, Fedora 40, the latest rboy sources): from enabling lto = true the rboy binary size dropped from 5.7 Mib to 4.5 Mib.

Thank you.

P.S. It's more like an improvement idea rather than a bug. I created the issue just because the Discussions are disabled for the repo for now.

mvdnes commented 1 month ago

I think this is a good idea. I have enabled the option in c9e9a78. Thank you for the suggestion! :+1: