As this page is outdated, please refer to Bevy's official migration guides while reading, to cover the differences: 0.12 to 0.13, 0.13 to 0.14.

I apologize for the inconvenience. I will update the page as soon as I find the time.

Optimize for Size

When serving a WASM binary, the smaller it is, the faster the browser can download it. Faster downloads means faster page load times and less data bandwidth use, and that means happier users and happier server hosts. ;)

This page gives some suggestions for how to make your WASM files smaller for deployment / release builds. You probably don't need small WASM files during development, and many of these techniques can get in the way of your workflow! They come at the cost of longer compile times and less debuggability.

Depending on the nature of your application, your mileage may vary, and performing measurements of binary size and execution speed is recommended.

Twiggy is a code size profiler for WASM binaries, which you can use to make measurements.

For additional information and more techniques, refer to the Code Size chapter in the Rust WASM book.

Do you know of more WASM size-optimization techniques? Post about them in the GitHub Issue Tracker so that they can be added to this page!

Compiling for size instead of speed

You can change the optimization profile of the compiler, to tell it to prioritize small output size, rather than performance.

(although in some rare cases, optimizing for size can actually improve speed)

In Cargo.toml, add one of the following:

[profile.release]
opt-level = 'z'

[profile.release]
opt-level = 's'

These are two different profiles for size optimization. Usually, z produces smaller files than s, but sometimes it can be the opposite. Measure to confirm which one works better for you.

Link-Time Optimization (LTO)

In Cargo.toml, add one of the following:

For some big improvements with moderate slowdown to compile times:

[profile.release]
lto = "thin"

For the biggest improvements at the cost of the slowest compile times:

[profile.release]
lto = true
codegen-units = 1

LTO tells the compiler to optimize all code together, considering all crates as if they were one. It may be able to inline and prune functions much more aggressively. This typically results in smaller size and better performance, but do measure to confirm. Sometimes, the size can actually be larger.

Use the wasm-opt tool

The binaryen toolkit is a set of extra tools for working with WASM. One of them is wasm-opt. It goes much further than what the compiler can do, and can be used to further optimize for either speed or size:

# Optimize for size (z profile).
wasm-opt -Oz -o output.wasm input.wasm

# Optimize for size (s profile).
wasm-opt -Os -o output.wasm input.wasm

# Optimize for speed.
wasm-opt -O3 -o output.wasm input.wasm

# Optimize for both size and speed.
wasm-opt -O -ol 100 -s 100 -o output.wasm input.wasm

You should run this command on the final WASM file you deploy to your website, after wasm-bindgen or other tools. If you run it before, wasm-bindgen can get confused and panic.