Dynamic frameworks should be stripped (STRIP_INSTALLED_PRODUCT)

[jrose-signal]

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A very old change, #1217, turned off the STRIP_INSTALLED_PRODUCT build setting to ensure that internal symbols from static libraries properly end up in the dSYMs created by the Archive action. However, this doesn't make sense for dynamic libraries, which have separate dSYMs from the resulting app. Not stripping internal symbols can result in a huge increase in binary size for Swift, which has long symbol names and many internal symbols. (Objective-C tends to produce public and static symbols but not internal (visibility(hidden)) in default Xcode configurations.)

For a concrete example, a release arm64 build of SignalServiceKit is 27MB by default, and 18MB after stripping. 😭

#1217 also mentions that only the project-level setting is respected, not per-target settings. That was probably true in the past, but is no longer true in Xcode 12.1. I don't know when this changed, but it does mean the default behavior can be kept as is while turning stripping back on at the per-target level if the build product is a dynamic framework. (CocoaPods doesn't support non-vendored dynamic library pods, right?)

CocoaPods Environment

Stack

   CocoaPods : 1.9.3
        Ruby : ruby 2.6.3p62 (2019-04-16 revision 67580) [universal.x86_64-darwin19]
    RubyGems : 3.0.3
        Host : Mac OS X 10.15.7 (19H15)
       Xcode : 12.2 (12B45b)
         Git : git version 2.24.3 (Apple Git-128)
Ruby lib dir : /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/2.6/usr/lib
Repositories : trunk - CDN - https://cdn.cocoapods.org/

Installation Source

Executable Path: /usr/local/Cellar/cocoapods/1.9.3/libexec/bin/pod

Plugins

cocoapods-binary      : 0.4.4
cocoapods-deintegrate : 1.0.4
cocoapods-plugins     : 1.0.0
cocoapods-search      : 1.0.0
cocoapods-stats       : 1.1.0
cocoapods-trunk       : 1.5.0
cocoapods-try         : 1.2.0

Podfile

# Uncomment the next line to define a global platform for your project
# platform :ios, '9.0'

target 'PodTest' do
  # Comment the next line if you don't want to use dynamic frameworks
  use_frameworks!

  # Pods for PodTest
  pod "AFNetworking"
end

[JoeSzymanski]

Has anyone found a good solution for this? We are hitting a similar issue around binary size for dynamic frameworks. However, when I explicitly change the stripping settings via the main app's Podfile (enabling "COPY_PHASE_STRIP" and "STRIP_INSTALLED_PRODUCT"), I run into the problem that the Swift symbols are mangled, so debugging becomes significantly harder.

[mgrms]

Same issue