DMD producing huge binaries

[poliklosio via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 21 May 2016 at 18:25:46 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 5/20/2016 11:18 PM, poliklosio wrote:
>> I have an Idea of reproducible, less-than-exponential time 
>> mangling, although I
>> don't know how actionable.
>>
>> Leave mangling as is, but pretend that you are mangling 
>> something different, for
>> example when the input is
>> foo!(boo!(bar!(baz!(int))), bar!(baz!(int)), baz!(int))
>> pretend that you are mangling
>> foo!(boo!(bar!(baz!(int))), #1, #2)
>> Where #1 and #2 are special symbols that refer to stuff that 
>> was **already in
>> the name**, particularly:
>> #1: bar!(baz!(int))
>> #2: baz!(int)
>
> This is what LZW compression does, except that LZW does it in 
> general rather than just for identifiers.

That's true, but a general compression algorithm requires a 
stream of chars as input, so to compress something of exponential 
size you still need exponential runtime in order to iterate 
(while compressing) on the exponential input.
The idea was to avoid such exponential iteration in the first 
place by doing some sort of caching.
My thinking is that if you only reduce size but keep exponential 
runtime, you are going to have to revisit the issue in a few 
months anyway when people start using things you enabled more 
heavily.
Anyway I wish you good luck with all this!