Reducing App Size

A bevy_cef app ships three kinds of files: your app's own binary, the bevy_cef render process, and the CEF runtime (the Chromium Embedded Framework on macOS, libcef and its resources on Windows and Linux). This page covers the Rust binaries.

Release profile for your app

Cargo keeps symbol tables in release binaries by default. Stripping them is the cheapest size win and does not change how the app runs:

[profile.release]
strip = "symbols"

Keep an unstripped copy of each release build, or split debug info, if you need to symbolicate crash reports.

Link-time optimization with a single codegen unit shrinks the binary further at the cost of longer release builds. On bevy_cef's render process it saved a further 19%:

[profile.release]
strip = "symbols"
lto = "fat"
codegen-units = 1

bevy_cef also builds its render process with opt-level = "z", which trades speed for size. That suits the render process, which runs little Rust code, but usually not a Bevy app.

Render process

Since bevy_cef 0.15.0, bevy_cef_render_process, installed with cargo install bevy_cef_render_process, is built with bevy_cef's size-oriented profile and does not depend on Bevy, so there is nothing to configure. A macOS bundle carries four copies of it, one per helper app.

On Windows (MSVC), debug info already lives in a separate .pdb file, so strip changes little there.