[FriBidi] Experience of reducing FriBidi size?

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Hi Mikael,

On 12/07/10 13:51, Mikael Hedlund wrote:

> For reference: when I compiled using GCC on Ubuntu, the C ref implementation
> binary was about 20 kB (dynamically linked) and the FriBidi lib was about 165
> kB (dynamically linked).
> 
> 1) Are there some easy steps to reduce the size of the FriBidi binary, and
> does anyone have any experience how much the FriBidi binary in that case could
> be reduced?
>     From a quick look in the code there seemed to be some fairly large tables
> which I assume could be reduced, plus some Hebrew related conversion routines
> to/from Unicode that are not needed in my case.
>     Are there any nifty defines or other config parameters I have missed, that
> would reduce size?

Sure we can make this work out for you.  First, lets configure without charset
converters, and without glib support:

./configure --disable-charsets --with-glib=no

Now build, and lets see how big it is:

$ ls -l lib/.libs/libfribidi.so.0.3.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 behdad eng 150817 Dec  7 14:42 lib/.libs/libfribidi.so.0.3.1

Note however, that number includes debugging symbols.  A better measure would
be either to call 'size' on it, or 'strip' it:

$ size lib/.libs/libfribidi.so.0.3.1
   text	   data	    bss	    dec	    hex	filename
  77223	    700	     40	  77963	  1308b	lib/.libs/libfribidi.so.0.3.1

So it's more like 80kb.  Lets strip it and confirm:

$ ls -l lib/.libs/libfribidi.so.0.3.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 behdad eng 84072 Dec  7 14:49 lib/.libs/libfribidi.so.0.3.1

Indeed, 84kb is all it is, bidi *and* arabic.

However, you can ask fribidi to compress its tables further:

Just switch into the lib/ dir and do:

$ make gen COMPRESSION=9
$ make

Lets check the size again:

$ ls -l .libs/libfribidi.so.0.3.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 behdad eng 107833 Dec  7 14:52 .libs/libfribidi.so.0.3.1

$ size .libs/libfribidi.so.0.3.1
   text	   data	    bss	    dec	    hex	filename
  33983	    700	     40	  34723	   87a3	.libs/libfribidi.so.0.3.1

$ ls -l .libs/libfribidi.so.0.3.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 behdad eng 39016 Dec  7 14:54 .libs/libfribidi.so.0.3.1

So, the whole library is 40kb.  Hope that's within your budget ;).

behdad