CGAL users discussion list

[Qianqian Fang <>]

hi everyone,

As some of you know, in my matlab meshing toolbox (iso2mesh), I embedded 
a few modified CGAL demo utilities. In the past, these utilities were 
statically compiled and distributed along with my toolbox. I saw there 
was a push to migrate to the newer CGAL releases 
(https://github.com/fangq/iso2mesh/issues/12#issuecomment-468601734), so 
last year, I had added the compilation scripts 
(https://github.com/fangq/iso2mesh/tree/master/tools) to compile these 
tools and link with the newer versions of CGAL, but noticed one problem: 
the binaries compiled/linked using the newer CGAL libraries (~4.10 or 
newer) are dramatically (5x to 10x) larger than the older libraries 
(3.8-4.2).

I got even more surprised as I started packaging iso2mesh for Fedora 
over the past few days

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1758626

the binaries generated on CGAL 4.14/Fedora 30 are even bigger than I've 
seen before - the 3D mesher code (cgalmesh) grows to 67MB compared to 
4.5MB using CGAL 3.8 (15x), and mesh_polyhedral mesher (cgalpoly) 
example produced a 90 MB executable compared to 4.3 MB previously.

I am wondering if there is a way (a link/compile flag?) that I can 
reduce the binary size? loading a large executable is quite inefficient 
because disk reading is very slow compared to execution. I could use an 
exe packers, such as upx, to compress the exe by about 9-fold, but they 
are still several fold larger than what they used to be (after packing).

let me know if you have any suggestions, thanks

Qianqian