Forum: wxRuby Suggestions to reduce binary size, make loading faster

I found wxruby2.so in mingw release a bit large (18M), it is smaller
(~15M) after stripping symbols. I learned this from
http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Reducing_Executable_Size . The command line
is:

    strip --strip-all wxruby2.so

But I don't know whether there is a problem with stripping, at least my
app still runs well with the stripped one.

---

The loading of wxruby is not very fast too(~ 1.3s on my machine). After
a small profile, I found the following code in wx.rb the bottle-neck:

    require 'wx/classes/evthandler.rb'
    class_files = File.join( File.dirname(__FILE__), 'wx', 'classes',
'*.rb')
    Dir.glob(class_files) do | class_file |
      require 'wx/classes/' + class_file[/\w+\.rb$/]
    end

A simple improvement is to make wx/classes/*.rb into one.
I wrote the following script, placed it under wx/, then run it to
generate a new classes.rb containing most classes under wx/classes/

    data = []
    (Dir.glob('classes/*.rb') - [
      'classes/evthandler.rb',
      'classes/simplehelpprovider.rb',
      'classes/bitmap.rb'
    ]).each do |f|
      data.push File.read f
    end
    File.open 'classes.rb', 'w' do |f|
      f.puts data.join "\n"
    end

Then I changed the classes loading section in wx.rb with:

    require 'wx/classes/evthandler.rb'
    require 'wx/classes.rb'

After this modification, the loading time seems shorter (reduced to ~
0.4s on my machine).

Hi Lui,

2010/2/4 Lui Kore <lists@ruby-forum.com>:
> I found wxruby2.so in mingw release a bit large (18M), it is smaller
> (~15M) after stripping symbols. I learned this from
> http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Reducing_Executable_Size . The command line
> is:
>
>    strip --strip-all wxruby2.so

We already use strip -x.
But strip --strip-all seems to reduce the size a little more.
I'll try and see if there is no problem.

> A simple improvement is to make wx/classes/*.rb into one.
> I wrote the following script, placed it under wx/, then run it to
> generate a new classes.rb containing most classes under wx/classes/

Interesting. I'll take a look at it.

Cheers.
Chauk-Mean.

Hi Lui,

2010/2/4 Lui Kore <lists@ruby-forum.com>:
> A simple improvement is to make wx/classes/*.rb into one.
> I wrote the following script, placed it under wx/, then run it to
> generate a new classes.rb containing most classes under wx/classes/
>

Sorry for such a long delay ...
I've tested your suggestion and indeed the loading is a bit faster.
But the improvement is only about 10-11% on my system according to a
Benchmark.measure of a require 'wx'.

I don't know yet if it is worth adding a rake task for generating the
classes.rb automatically even if I've already written it.

Does anybody has an opinion on the subject ?

Cheers.
Chauk-Mean.