the emitted zig executable of my project is rather large considering its a small project still, 43 MB in debug mode, 32 MB for fast mode.
is there some tool that lets me look into the executable and get human-readable information on whats taking space? preferably in descending order.
The same way you examine any other EXE, independent of source language, for the target you’re using (which you haven’t mentioned).
On Linux, nm --size-sort <filename> will list out all the symbols in your file sorted by size (biggest at the bottom).
Bloaty McBloatface (yes it was really called that at one time) is pretty good, also lets you create diffs:
also consider using exe.strip = true if you for example don’t care about having good stack traces.
If I remember correctly some people also manually strip the exe with external tools in such a way that you can re-add the symbol information later again, but I don’t have practical experience with that.
I think on windows that info is separate from the exe in the .pdb file anyway, so there it is already stored in a way where you don’t have to deploy the debug info and can access it separately.