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urrickhunt / drugwars-rust

Drugwars in Rust 🦀
MIT License
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Enable Link-Time Optimization (LTO) #1

Closed zamazan4ik closed 3 weeks ago

zamazan4ik commented 3 weeks 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 (because why not :).

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 E.g., check cargo-outdated Release profile.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 tests (Fedora 40): lto = true reduces the binary size for the Release profile from 568 kib to 518 Kib. Not a big deal but anyway a good almost free improvement!

Thank you.

urrickhunt commented 3 weeks ago

this is a great suggestion. i have modified the profile

[profile.release-lto] inherits = "release" lto = true

now you can run

cargo build --profile release-lto

without modifying anything.