Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonthorsness | Hacker News Reader

I see the note in the article around using -ldflags="-s -w" - is there any other useful tool for binary size analysis/reduction? I was surprised when my binary size doubled when incorporating the K8s client package to get a secret; just using the HTTP secrets API manually without referencing the client package shrank the size by many MB. It would be nice to find similar opportunities for size reduction that aren’t as obvious.

View on HN

goda[0] is excellent. You do do things like:

  # show the impact of cutting any package
  goda cut ./...:all

which prints a sorted ASCII table with stats like 'size:4.4MB loc:134171' for each package, which is an estimate the savings you'd get if you eliminated that package from your binary. That is a great way to see what is unexpectedly large compared to its value.

goda has a bunch of other capabilities around dependency analysis, and was written by long-time Go contributor Egon Elbre. The examples in the README are the best way to get started after 'go install github.com/loov/goda@latest'.

[0] https://github.com/loov/goda

The go k8s packages are pretty bloated - this may also just be a niche case. If you are looking to get secrets with hot reloading, you might also consider mounting a file or setting env vars and coupling it with this reloading operator: https://github.com/stakater/Reloader

go-binsize-treemap[1] is the best tool for this by a large margin. I came across it because of the exact same reason as you did actually, k8s client bloating my binary massively.

[1] https://github.com/nikolaydubina/go-binsize-treemap

Reply on news.ycombinator.com