Suggestions to reduce binary size, make loading faster

Desktop wxRuby
1

I found wxruby2.so in mingw release a bit large (18M), it is smaller
(~15M) after stripping symbols. I learned this from
Reducing Executable Size - WxWiki . The command line
is:

strip --strip-all wxruby2.so

But I don’t know whether there is a problem with stripping, at least my
app still runs well with the stripped one.

The loading of wxruby is not very fast too(~ 1.3s on my machine). After
a small profile, I found the following code in wx.rb the bottle-neck:

require 'wx/classes/evthandler.rb'
class_files = File.join( File.dirname(__FILE__), 'wx', 'classes',

‘*.rb’)
Dir.glob(class_files) do | class_file |
require ‘wx/classes/’ + class_file[/\w+.rb$/]
end

A simple improvement is to make wx/classes/*.rb into one.
I wrote the following script, placed it under wx/, then run it to
generate a new classes.rb containing most classes under wx/classes/

data = []
(Dir.glob('classes/*.rb') - [
  'classes/evthandler.rb',
  'classes/simplehelpprovider.rb',
  'classes/bitmap.rb'
]).each do |f|
  data.push File.read f
end
File.open 'classes.rb', 'w' do |f|
  f.puts data.join "\n"
end

Then I changed the classes loading section in wx.rb with:

require 'wx/classes/evthandler.rb'
require 'wx/classes.rb'

After this modification, the loading time seems shorter (reduced to ~
0.4s on my machine).

2

Hi Lui,

2010/2/4 Lui K. [email protected]:

I found wxruby2.so in mingw release a bit large (18M), it is smaller
(~15M) after stripping symbols. I learned this from
Reducing Executable Size - WxWiki . The command line
is:

strip --strip-all wxruby2.so

We already use strip -x.
But strip --strip-all seems to reduce the size a little more.
I’ll try and see if there is no problem.

A simple improvement is to make wx/classes/*.rb into one.
I wrote the following script, placed it under wx/, then run it to
generate a new classes.rb containing most classes under wx/classes/

Interesting. I’ll take a look at it.

Cheers.
Chauk-Mean.

3

Hi Lui,

2010/2/4 Lui K. [email protected]:

A simple improvement is to make wx/classes/*.rb into one.
I wrote the following script, placed it under wx/, then run it to
generate a new classes.rb containing most classes under wx/classes/

Sorry for such a long delay …
I’ve tested your suggestion and indeed the loading is a bit faster.
But the improvement is only about 10-11% on my system according to a
Benchmark.measure of a require ‘wx’.

I don’t know yet if it is worth adding a rake task for generating the
classes.rb automatically even if I’ve already written it.

Does anybody has an opinion on the subject ?

Cheers.
Chauk-Mean.