Hi All, I saw this question first popped up at JuliaCon 2021: [The State of Julia | JuliaCon 2021 | Stefan Karpinksi, Viral Shah, Jeff Bezanson, & Keno Fischer] Since then I have seen a lot of talk and discussion about it as well as some attempt (StaticCompiler.jl) to address the missi…

So while there isn’t a clear roadmap at the moment, it is a goal of the Julia team to have small binaries (It’s the main thing I’ll be working on in the near future). The vision is to have something like juliac that takes in a module or a script (this isn’t super clear just yet, but also isn’t super…

[image] TheLateKronos: I could be wrong, but could we not compile inefficient compiled code for abstract types, e.g. Number? Compiling for a concrete type is only needed for maximal performance, no? This depends on the definition of “small”. This compiled code would need to dynamically dispat…

I think people are forgetting another part of the story here. The size of the pre-compiled cache files. They are (relatively speaking) huge files. Makie is 130 Mb. GMT (the one that bothers me more for direct reasons) is > 100 Mb on Julia nightly. Why are those sooo big?

[image] Mason: “want statically compiled small binaries? Make your code completely type stable and non-allocating” That sounds very restrictive. C++ allows you to have type instabilities in a controlled way (runtime dispatch with inheritance and virtual functions), allocations with RAII, and …

[image] joa-quim: Why are those sooo big? To play devil’s advocate, why does it matter? I mean, really, Julia’s compiled code size doesn’t affect me at all. It seems like there are tons of other more exciting stuff that Julia devs could do (and are doing) than optimizing storage costs of comp…

Isn’t this a thread about small binaries?

[image] Could Someone Explain To Me the Desire for Small Julia Binaries? General Usage Hi folks, I’ve seen this notion pop-up repeatedly about wanting small binaries created within the Julia ecosystem. I personally have been quite confused about this desire due to probabl…

[image] greatpet: How large is the part of the runtime dedicated to dynamic dispatch? (Assuming LLVM is not needed as all methods have been precompiled.) Some languages with dynamic dispatch are implemented with a tiny amount of code, e.g. FemtoLisp. Obviously Julia’s multiple dispatch rules are…

[image] nsajko: To play devil’s advocate, why does it matter? I mean, really, Julia’s compiled code size doesn’t affect me at all. And same thing with performance. Do we really care about an extra half a second here and there? Must we always be in such a hurry, when perhaps a leisurely and re…

It doesn’t work like this. For small binaries, you need to eliminate runtime by discarding all the method tables and useless binaries, especially those in Base and stdlib library, as they are rather huge codebases. If you compile with Number, then you have to save every potential method tables at ru…

[image] anon56330260: it requires modification to core language (like adding OOP) What do you mean by “adding OOP”? You mean inheritance from concrete types? How would that help with binary size?

Roadmap for small binaries

Internals & Design

jar1 October 22, 2023, 9:57pm 66

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Roadmap for small binaries

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