Nim binary size from 160 KB to 150 Bytes

#1

Post by def- » Mon, May 04, 2015, 11:39 AM UTC

Nim binary size from 160 KB to 150 Bytes
hookrace.net

Re: Nim binary size from 160 KB to 150 Bytes

#2

Post by cristaloleg » Mon, May 04, 2015, 12:41 PM UTC

WOW. 10/10

Re: Nim binary size from 160 KB to 150 Bytes

#3

Post by killercup » Mon, May 04, 2015, 1:18 PM UTC

> (1 byte smaller than in Rust)

Nice achievement! The article is quite the journey through various build parameters, switching gcc for clang and glibc for musl along the way. In the end, the secret sauce is syscalls and custom linking, though (as always with this kind of thing).

Re: Nim binary size from 160 KB to 150 Bytes

#4

Post by masklinn » Mon, May 04, 2015, 1:20 PM UTC

Comparison summary between the Rust inspiration and the Nim version:

* Nim/GCC gains 2 bytes by smartly reusing the previously set AX register's value to set DI where Rust/Clang uses an immediate

* Nim can't express that stuff after the EXIT syscall is unreachable and wastes a byte on a RETQ.

Re: Nim binary size from 160 KB to 150 Bytes

#5

Post by teh » Mon, May 04, 2015, 1:23 PM UTC

Today I looked at Nim in a bit more depth because it keeps popping up. I have a slightly uncomfortable feeling about it that I hope is unfounded!

To me it looks like it makes the unsafety of c more accessible because of better tooling and nicer syntax. Looking at e.g. [1] there are still pointers, null-pointers etc, just like in c. So now you have a language that looks superficially simple but is actually very dangerous. Compare this to e.g. rust which was the most painful thing I learned recently but I also know that it brings something fundamentally new to the table.

Anyway, there's a lot I don't understand about Nim and I'd be happy to see evidence to the contrary.

[1] http://nim-lang.org/0.11.0/tut1.html#advanced-types-referenc...

Re: Nim binary size from 160 KB to 150 Bytes

#6

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 04, 2015, 1:30 PM UTC

teh wrote: post #5

Today I looked at Nim in a bit more depth because it keeps popping up. I have a slightly uncomfortable feeling about it that I hope is unfounded! To me it looks like it makes the unsafety of c more accessible because of better tooling and nicer syntax. Looking at e.g. [1] there are still pointers, null-pointers etc, just like in c. So now you have a language that looks superficially simple but is actually very danger…

[deleted]

Re: Nim binary size from 160 KB to 150 Bytes

#7

Post by delinka » Mon, May 04, 2015, 1:36 PM UTC

"The speed optimized binary is much smaller..."

Did I miss where he optimized for speed?

Re: Nim binary size from 160 KB to 150 Bytes

#8

Post by lukevers » Mon, May 04, 2015, 1:43 PM UTC

delinka wrote: post #7

"The speed optimized binary is much smaller..." Did I miss where he optimized for speed?

Including `-d:release` optimizes it, so that's probably what he meant. It's one of the first things in the [tutorial](http://nim-lang.org/0.11.0/tut1.html).

Re: Nim binary size from 160 KB to 150 Bytes

#9

Post by masklinn » Mon, May 04, 2015, 1:45 PM UTC

delinka wrote: post #7

"The speed optimized binary is much smaller..." Did I miss where he optimized for speed?

I'm guessing -d:release implies —opt:speed (on top of disabling various runtime checks)

Re: Nim binary size from 160 KB to 150 Bytes

#10

Post by _blrj » Mon, May 04, 2015, 1:48 PM UTC

I love these articles; I make sure to bookmark them just in case one day I want to build binaries that do nothing.