Mirror of forum.nim-lang.org

9860 :: Minimising of using imports in the same project

• demetera (orginal) [2023-01-31T22:58:17+01:00] view original

  Dear All,

  maybe my question is a bit trifling, but I care about binary size and possible memory usage (even it's minimal). If I have more than one files in the project (e.g. utils.nim and main.nim), and let's say I use:

  import strutils
  Run

  in lib.nim project file, main.nim won't see symbols from strutils, unless I won't explicitly use the same import in main.nim* or won't include the whole **lib.nim (I'm not sure it's appropriate in perspective of convention).

  Any good recommendations, practices, criticism on that?

  Thanks

---

• xigoi (orginal) [2023-02-01T00:00:02+01:00] view original

  Don't worry about duplicate imports affecting binary size. This is not C(++), we don't have a dumb parody of a module system.

---

• treeform (orginal) [2023-02-01T01:17:50+01:00] view original

  Nim trims unused code and does not generate duplicate code. So you can import anything you want but if you only use function, only it will be included in the binary.

  If you really want to save space in your exe I written a tool to analyze it: https://github.com/treeform/dumpincludes

  I ended up never really needed this tool as Nim produces small exes no matter what you include.

---

• cblake (orginal) [2023-02-01T12:49:21+01:00] view original

  On Linux you can also do something like exsz { mostly just nm -oS --defined-only -fposix -td | sort -nk5 } on your nim-cache directory *.c.o's after building to explain object size in terms of functions / symbols which was useful for me when trying to add turn-off-feature-to-save-space switches for https://github.com/c-blake/cligen/issues/207 .

---