Why are Linux prebuilt libraries so much larger than other platforms?

[FeldrinH]

Looking at the prebuilt libraries (from https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit-c/releases/tag/0.15.1), I notice that the libraries for Linux are a lot bigger than the ones for Windows. For example windows/x86_64/msvc/shared/ has 376 kB of files excluding debug symbols., whereas linux/x86_64/shared/ has 1.75 MB of files excluding debug symbols (I stripped debug symbols with strip libaccesskit.so).

Why are the Linux libraries so big and is there any hope that they might become smaller in the future?

[DataTriny]

Hello @FeldrinH,

This is a known issue. It is mostly due to the D-Bus library we use. See here: z-galaxy/zbus#304

The situation may improve over time, although tackling this is not our priority right now.

Is it a blocker for you?

[DataTriny]

For maximum flexibility, it is recommended to build the library yourself. The profile section in Cargo.toml contain some settings that you can tweak. For instance, setting debug = false will decrease binary size at the cost of less helpful crash logs. You can find documentation for these settings on the Cargo book.

[Jookia]

The file size has ballooned to 20MB for shared, 40MB for static.

Edit: Building from source with debug=false and CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release gives 12MB static and 2.2MB shared. Stripping them drops to 4.5MB and 1.8MB. This is a lot more reasonable.