Use sstrip for better stripping and other notes

[ghost]

I recently discovered an interesting tool - sstrip, see https://man.archlinux.org/man/community/elfkickers/sstrip.1.en
https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/elfkickers.html

sudo pacman -S elfkickers

It's a better strip that strips everything that isn't needed for the binary to run.

Also, FYI, -s for the C compiler is worse than using strip, so it should always be done.

Default repo (I don't have musl-* stuff):

 98.2 KiB 
 67.3 KiB -d:release
 39.6 KiB -d:release --passC:-flto --passL:-flto
 34.5 KiB -d:release --passC:-flto --passL:-flto --passL:-s
 26.5 KiB -d:release --passC:-flto --passL:-flto --passL:-s --opt:size
  6.1 KiB -d:release --opt:size --panics:on -d:useMalloc --os:any -d:posix -d:noSignalHandler --cc=clang --clang.exe='/home/dian/Projects/NimExperiments/binary-size/zigcc' --clang.linkerexe='/home/dian/Projects/NimExperiments/binary-size/zigcc' --passC:'-flto -target x86_64-linux-musl' --passL:'-flto -target x86_64-linux-musl'

Use the strip command in the code for all compilers, not just zig cc:

 82.4 KiB 
 58.4 KiB -d:release
 34.4 KiB -d:release --passC:-flto --passL:-flto
 34.4 KiB -d:release --passC:-flto --passL:-flto --passL:-s
 26.4 KiB -d:release --passC:-flto --passL:-flto --passL:-s --opt:size
  6.1 KiB -d:release --opt:size --panics:on -d:useMalloc --os:any -d:posix -d:noSignalHandler --cc=clang --clang.exe='/home/dian/Projects/NimExperiments/binary-size/zigcc' --clang.linkerexe='/home/dian/Projects/NimExperiments/binary-size/zigcc' --passC:'-flto -target x86_64-linux-musl' --passL:'-flto -target x86_64-linux-musl'

Use sstrip -z {filename} instead:

80.3 KiB 
56.3 KiB -d:release
32.3 KiB -d:release --passC:-flto --passL:-flto
32.3 KiB -d:release --passC:-flto --passL:-flto --passL:-s
24.3 KiB -d:release --passC:-flto --passL:-flto --passL:-s --opt:size
 5.3 KiB -d:release --opt:size --panics:on -d:useMalloc --os:any -d:posix -d:noSignalHandler --cc=clang --clang.exe='/home/dian/Projects/NimExperiments/binary-size/zigcc' --clang.linkerexe='/home/dian/Projects/NimExperiments/binary-size/zigcc' --passC:'-flto -target x86_64-linux-musl' --passL:'-flto -target x86_64-linux-musl'

As you can see, it saves ~1KB for zig cc and ~2KB for other compilers, for free :)

[ghost]

Some other notes:

IMO zig cc should also be tried with both Glibc (dynamic linking) and musl, but without all the os:any/useMalloc/posix stuff, basically same as other options.

For example:

nim c -d:release --opt:size --cc=clang --clang.exe='/home/dian/Projects/NimExperiments/binary-size/zigcc' --clang.linkerexe='/home/dian/Projects/NimExperiments/binary-size/zigcc' --passC:'-flto -target x86_64-linux-gnu' --passL:'-flto -target x86_64-linux-gnu' -o:helooo --gc:arc hello.nim

after sstrip results in a 16KB glibc-linked binary (8KB smaller than the same with GCC), which is really interesting

And yeah, any reason you're not testing with -d:danger as well?