How Can I Inspect the Size Impact of Symbols in an App Binary: A Practical Guide for Apple Developers

In the previous posts we talked about Build Pipeline, Jargon, Static Linker vs Dynamic Linker. In this post we’ll benefit from the knowledge gained about the app wrapper’s folder structure and the placement of all the different binaries (frameworks and main app’s executable) to know where to look for. New in this post is learning how to use the nm command to inspect and count the number of symbols of each binary....

August 11, 2023 · 9 min

Optimizing Binaries - High Level Xcode Build Pipeline

This the first post of a series I’m doing on how to optimize your app’s binaries. The post is more of a high level intro. Depending on the action (build, run, test, profile, analyze, archive) of your scheme, the process will have all or some of the following steps: Dependency analysis What happens when you press build? So the first step is for the build system to take the build description, your Xcode project file....

May 3, 2023 · 4 min