Large shared library size (200MB) when linking google-cloud-cpp speech and texttospeech libraries

[Nullarity]

I am developing an application for Android. My application needs to convert voice to text and text to voice. Therefore, I use these two components: google-cloud-cpp::speech and google-cloud-cpp::texttospeech. The following is a simplified CMakeLists.txt:

cmake_minimum_required ( VERSION 3.25 )
project ( assistant VERSION 1.0.0 )
set ( CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 20 )
find_package ( google_cloud_cpp_speech CONFIG REQUIRED )
find_package ( google_cloud_cpp_texttospeech CONFIG REQUIRED )
add_library ( assistant SHARED src/assistant.cpp )
target_link_libraries ( assistant PRIVATE google-cloud-cpp::speech google-cloud-cpp::texttospeech )

Building this project with MinSizeRel results in an assistant.so of approximately 200MB (google libraries were built shared=off).

My question is: is this normal, or am I doing something wrong (or not doing something right), and should the library size be this large for such basic functionality?

Thank you!

--
Linux x64, gcc 11.4

[dbolduc]

approximately 200MB ... is this normal?

Maybe. I think it depends on how much of the google-cloud-cpp::* libraries you are using.

I ran through this exercise (repro-14932.zip).

• I build with -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF
• I build with -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=MinSizeRel
• the only modification to your CMakeLists.txt is to use add_executable(foo foo.cpp), instead of add_library(... SHARED ...).

I get 21MB for the binary size.

The application I was using is just a concatenation of the speech quickstart and the texttospeech quickstart

They only call one function each on the client. The binary size would grow if they were more complex.

Let me know if this helps at all.

[dbolduc]

@Nullarity - can I close this bug? Any other questions?

[Nullarity]

@dbolduc
Sorry for the delay, and thank you very much for the answer. Let me take your example and play with it. I will get back to you tomorrow. Thank you.

[Nullarity]

@dbolduc

In my case, I need a shared library for Android, so as soon as I do this:
add_library ( quickstart SHARED quickstart.cpp ) the libquickstart.so grows dramatically because it must include all dependencies it needs to run independently (including all required Google Cloud SDK libraries).

So, the solution is to put this:
set(CMAKE_SHARED_LINKER_FLAGS "${CMAKE_SHARED_LINKER_FLAGS} -Wl,--strip-all")

into CMakeLists.txt, which strips unnecessary symbols and my library becomes about 30MB instead of 200MB.

Problem solved. Thank you.