Understanding Preference Settings

[bradcarman]

The documentation about reducing the cost of precompilation states "You can also specify additional packages (e.g., dependencies of MyPackage) if you're co-developing a suite of packages.". How is this done? It's not clear how I list those packages.

Additional question: is it possible to turn off precompilation workloads all together for my development environment for all packages/dependencies? The reason why I want this is because I'm creating a system image that I would like to keep as small as possible, therefore I only want to include compilation for my specific code. Is this possible?

[timholy]

It's exactly the same: just set "precompile_workload" => false on each such package. ?set_preferences! will show you various options: you can pass a module or a UUID.

Alternatively, you could turn it off for one or two and then make the (fairly obvious) edits to LocalPreferences.toml manually.

I'd be most appreciative if you submitted a pull request (https://github.com/JuliaLang/PrecompileTools.jl/blob/main/docs/src/index.md and click the pencil icon) to make this clearer to other readers! It's often hard for those who wrote the code to understand what about the documentation is unclear (we know too much about the internals to approach the documentation with the same mindset).

[bradcarman]

OK very good, I'll make a PR to try and make that more clear.

I'm also considering making an option to disable PrecompileTools.jl all together, which is useful when using PackageCompiler.jl to reduce the created system image size. I just did an experiment, fully disabled PrecompileTools and SnoopPrecompile and was able to generate a system image what was 200MB smaller! Of course one could disable packages one by one, but it's very difficult to know which packages are implementing these tools, and the list of dependencies can be very long. When creating a system image, I'm already executing a targeted precompilation script, so in this case PrecompileTools.jl is not needed.

[timholy]

I'd be supportive of an option to disable it altogether.