Metadata for DLLs should actually go in the LIB import library on Windows #29511
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C-enhancement
Category: An issue proposing an enhancement or a PR with one.
O-windows
Operating system: Windows
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Arguably, the same could be said about dylibs on all platforms. |
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Can we close this now that we've got cdylibs? |
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The problem still exists for regular dylibs though. It's just not as important of a problem anymore. |
Mark-Simulacrum
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C-feature-request
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cc #93945 |
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lnicola
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Apr 28, 2025
Introduce `-Zembed-metadata` to allow omitting full metadata from rlibs and dylibs This is a continuation of rust-lang/rust#120855 (I was mentored by `@bjorn3` to move it forward). Most of the original code was written by bjorn3, I tried to clean it up a bit and add some documentation and tests. This PR introduces a new unstable compiler flag called `-Zembed-metadata=[no|yes]`, with the default being `yes` (see rust-lang/rust#57076 for context). When set to `no`, rustc will only store a small metadata stub inside rlibs/dylibs instead of the full metadata, to keep their size smaller. It should be used in combination with `--emit=metadata`, so that the users of such a compiled library can still read the metadata from the corresponding `.rmeta` file. [This comment](rust-lang/rust#120855 (comment)) shows an example of binary/artifact size wins that can be achieved using this approach. Contrary to rust-lang/rust#120855, this PR only introduces the new flag, along with a couple of run-make tests and documentation, but does not yet use it in bootstrap to actually compile rustc. I plan to do that as a follow-up step (along with integration in Cargo, which should ideally just always pass this flag to reduce the size of target directories). Fixes rust-lang/rust#23366 Closes rust-lang/rust#29511 Fixes rust-lang/rust#57076 Another attempt of rust-lang/rust#93945 and rust-lang/rust#120855. r? `@petrochenkov`
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Since metadata is only needed when building things, but the DLL is needed at runtime, it would be better if the metadata was moved to the LIB import library instead since that is only needed when building things as well. This would save significantly on space when distributing a binary with DLLs.
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