Stand-alone images and the Cocoa UI backend

In my previous entry I was testing minimal image generation with the X11 UI backend. The Cocoa UI backend is a bit trickier, because it relies on various dynamic behaviors. After a bit of hacking, I got the deployment tool working with the Cocoa UI backend, but the generated images were too large. For example, Alex Chapman's Factor Tetris with X11 is a 714 Kb image, whereas Tetris with Cocoa was 1.5 Mb. This is because the Cocoa binding builds a database of known Objective C methods in a global hashtable, and the tree shaker cannot pair down this hashtable because it doesn't have enough information. Luckily, the deployment tool is pretty flexible, so after a bit more work I added a custom strip stage which is only run if the Cocoa UI backend is loaded. It performs a bit of static analysis to determine which methods are actually called, then pairs down the method database to only include these methods. The result was a deployed Cocoa Tetris image which is comparable in size to the X11 version, 793 Kb.