Consider partial trimming in client releases

[alexrp]

c9afc56 removed trimming from the build system. While full trimming is impractical for us, we could explore partial trimming. I think we only do reflection on our own assemblies, so there should be no issue with trimming any third-party assemblies that declare themselves trimmable.

Right now, a client release archive with maximum compression is around 171 MB, which seems rather excessive.

Depends on:

• Reimplement packet serialization with source generators #108

[alexrp]

A few things:

• Anything the bridge module needs from the BCL has to be preserved with a descriptor file.
• We invoke Unsafe.As<T>(object) through reflection in a few places. This method needs to be preserved with a descriptor file.
• Our reflection usage needs to be audited and warnings suppressed where we only reflect on our own code.
• Our use of the Avalonia.ReactiveUI package seems to cause quite a lot of warnings. We might be able to do without it.

[alexrp]

We'll try to switch to the MVVM Toolkit to make this happen.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/communitytoolkit/mvvm

[alexrp]

bc0b499

[alexrp]

We will have to switch away from Refit for the gateway client: reactiveui/refit#1389

🤷

There is this alternative... but where is the source code?

[alexrp]

Current status:

• Various trimming warnings in DotNext.Metaprogramming dotnet/dotNext#217 - Hopefully we can find a solution with upstream that involves adding the relevant annotations. Will try to contribute a PR if necessary.
• IL2026 & 2104 Trim Warnings AvaloniaUI/Avalonia#13897 - Not sure if we can suppress these somehow. If not, we'll just have to turn warnings-as-errors off for trimming purposes.
• Still need to audit all trimmer warnings in our own code (src/shared and src/client) and add appropriate annotations. This is straightforward.

[ghostnguyen]

We will have to switch away from Refit for the gateway client: reactiveui/refit#1389

🤷

There is this alternative... but where is the source code?

The source code/dll need to run your project are:

• The generated code in your project.
• HttpFillerAttribute and HttpFillerCore (https://github.com/ghostnguyen/HttpClientFillerIssue/)