Dart documentation inside the compiled kernel / .dill file

[LesYampolskyi]

After version [email protected] the compiled .dill file contains dart documentation and its size is increased up to 8mb.

dart compile kernel hello.dart

Open the compiled hello.dill in text editor. All documentation text is appended to the file.

Dart 3.5.4 (stable) (Wed Oct 16 16:18:51 2024 +0000) on "macos_x64"

[dart-github-bot]

Summary: Dart 3.3.4+ .dill files include embedded Dart documentation, significantly increasing file size (up to 8MB). This is a new behavior impacting compiled kernel files.

[jensjoha]

In 3.3.4 compiling to kernel (dart compile kernel) resulted in a file with sources included, but without the platform. For a hello world file that output size is ~500 bytes.
In 3.4.0 compiling to kernel (as above) resulted in a file with sources included and with the platform included as well. The output size for a hello world file is ~7.6MB.

So yes, you are right that the size increased a lot, but it's a question of the platform (the sdk) being included or not.

I believe this was introduced in 5a38644 and @bkonyi might have more context about why this was done.

You can get the old behavior by giving the option --no-link-platform, e.g. dart compile kernel --no-link-platform hello.dart.

All in all I'll say this is working as intended and will close this issue.