Is there a way to disable JVM-like stack traces?

[nreid260]

We're transforming the Kotlin compiler into a native-image. This works, but the resulting ELF is quite large. From decompiling some of the functions, we see that there are a lot of instructions for handling StackOverflowExceptions copied into every function. We also observe that during crashes, we get stack trace listing JVM classnames and line numbers.

This begs the question: Can we get native stacktraces instead? Seemingly this would seemingly unblock two significant improvements:

• A lot of instructions for StackOverflowExceptions would be obviated
• The classname strings could be removed from the binary

I might be missing something here, but these are tradeoffs I'd gladly make.

[alina-yur]

Hi @nreid260, to answer both your questions, there are two things I would suggest:
— You can use Build Reports to see which parts of the application contribute the most to the image size, for code area you can get breakdown by bytecode size and by method count.
— Another things to try would be using the -Os flag ("optimize for size"), it can reduce the image size for up to ~30%.

Unfortunately, at the moment there is no option to disable stack traces. If you have a specific case where the stack overflow increases the size significantly, it would be helpful if you could share with us a reproducer.

[nreid260]

When I try passing -Os, I get an error back: Error: Invalid option '-Os'. Accepted values are 'b' or numeric value >= 0.

build-report is not available in the Community edition. However, I was able to use standard debugging tools to inspect the function and heap sizes. The heap-dump overview can be seen #10248 The function sizes appear not terrible.

kotlinc is pretty bloaty, so it's hard to tell which parts are actually needed. There are 140K functions to sift though.

[alina-yur]

When I try passing -Os, I get an error back: Error: Invalid option '-Os'. Accepted values are 'b' or numeric value >= 0.

You must be on a version <23. In that case you can either upgrade, or if not possible use upx for compression.