[Rcpp-devel] Large size of libs directory on some systems

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 25 November 2016 at 12:41, Dean Bodenham wrote:
| I have written an R package using Rcpp that has recently been accepted to CRAN.
| However, on a few systems the installed size ("libs" directory) is much larger
| than on other systems, which leads to a couple of NOTEs:
| https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_ffstream.html
| 
| Here is an example of this discrepancy that I have observed on two (of my own)
| machines:
| 
| 
| Operating system            |   Size
| ----------------------------|---------
| OSX 10.10.5                 |  1.1 MB
| Ubuntu 16.04 (Linux Mint 18)|  9.0 MB
| 
| 
| Has anyone seen this problem before? 
| 
| The package should survive with the NOTEs, but it would be good to fix it if
| possible.
| 
| [Although the various (test) systems on CRAN use different versions of the
| compiler(s), which may affect things, I realise it is more likely that I have
| made a mistake when writing/structuring the code.]

I don't think it is you. Run 'R CMD INSTALL ...' on both systems, I bet one
is running with -g and the other is not. Those add debugging symbols, and
they are HUGE.

Dan Dillon has some experimental code to provide a stripping plugin.  Until
then, and just for local tests, do something like this in src/Makevars:

   PKG_LIBS= -Wl,-S

This asks the linker to use -S to strip debugging symbols (but not general
symbols, which R needs).  On my Ubuntu 16.04 box I get a change from

   9.0 mb    (default)

to

   734 kb    (with stripping)

for twelve-fold reduction in size _on the same system_.

If/when we have something more general I am sure it will be announced here.
If you want to play with the plugin hit me and/or Dan (CC'ed).

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org