VA Smalltalk doesn't strip an image; it builds a new image based on application dependencies. With VA's packaging functionality, you are more likely to get a packaging error that reports you are trying to use something that isn't reachable according to the defined dependencies.

I admit that except for the first few years, most of my early Smalltalk experience involved ENVY and VA/VisualAge Smalltalk. Still, I prefer it's practice of building an image based on what you have told it to include.

On Aug 21, 2017 15:22, "Tim Mackinnon" <tim@testit.works> wrote:
There has been a lot of great work on this front on the Pharo side from the "team" and PharoLambda has made use of it (although it's a tiny project).

My footprint is ~22mb including vm & image. And leaving out sources.

The ./scripts directory has the example of how to do it, along side the��.gitlab-ci.yml��file.

Unlike the commercial distributions (and this may have changed recently), there is a minimal image you can have download, which has enough to bootstrap loading your project via metacello. There are no browser tools or morphic things in the starting image I have chosen.

You can potentially get smaller - but it's a decent result. The only bit I added was to remove testcases (optional), and clear down metacello.

It's probably worthy of a blog post - but honestly the running example is pretty straight forward.

The commercial tools all have a decent "strip dead code" tool, that does a similar thing in reverse - which is equally a decent way of approaching the problem and can lead to even tinier results.

Tim

Sent from my iPhone

On 21 Aug 2017, at 21:25, horrido <horrido.hobbies@gmail.com> wrote:

I received this comment on Facebook:

Smalltalk is a fantastic language and its development environment can't be
beat... But the documentation for the many open source implementations is
contradictory or confusing or missing. I can't speak for the commercial
versions. Without an experienced mentor it is not possible to create a
complex app. And even when you have done so, *I know no way to strip out the
unused part of the image as well as the embedded source code*.
-----

This issue of stripping out unused code seems to recur a lot. And truth be
told, I've never seen a clear explanation of how to do this. Can someone
provide clear direction? Is this documented anywhere? I'd like to use the
information in future to assuage other people's concerns.

Thanks.



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