Strip debug symbols in release

[savchenko]

When building via cargo build --release, symbols are still present:

checksec --file=$HOME/.local/bin/ta
RELRO           STACK CANARY      NX            PIE             RPATH      RUNPATH        Symbols         FORTIFY Fortified       Fortifiable     FILE
Full RELRO      Canary found      NX enabled    PIE enabled     No RPATH   No RUNPATH   19684) Symbols      No    0   12

Perhaps good ol' RUSTFLAGS='-C link-arg=-s' cargo build --release will do as default release step?

[djmitche]

Could this be accomplished in Cargo.toml? https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/profiles.html

Aside from binary size, what's the issue with including symbols?

[savchenko]

Aside from binary size, what's the issue with including symbols?

None. But the difference is ~4.2 vs 17.3 Mb.

[savchenko]

Could this be accomplished in Cargo.toml?

"It depends". This should eventually work:

cargo-features = ["strip"]

[workspace]
members = [
    "taskchampion",
    "cli",
    "sync-server"
]

[profile.release]
strip = "symbols"

At present this requires nightly rustc. With rustc 1.48.0 that is shipped in Debian 11 the feature returns an error:

error: the option `Z` is only accepted on the nightly compiler

[savchenko]

Tried upx to see if executable with debug symbols can be efficiently packed and it somewhat surprisingly fails on TC:

        File size         Ratio      Format      Name
   --------------------   ------   -----------   -----------
upx: task: CantPackException: bad DT_GNU_HASH n_bucket=0x3a  n_bitmask=0x4  len=0x198

[dbr]

rust-lang/rust#72110 is the tracking issue for stripping debug info etc from Cargo.toml. It being stabilized seems to be largely blocked by macOS support, rust-lang/rust#82037

This seems like a good thing to aim for in a "1.0" release, by which point this feature will hopefully be in Rust stable

[dbr]

The option for this seems like it'll be stablized in the next month or so
rust-lang/rust#90058

[dbr]

rustc -C strip now stable as of Rust toolchain 1.58, and the strip option is available in cargo as of 1.59,

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#cargo-159-2022-02-24