I did a lot of this for my raytracer, c-ray [1]. Originally it was just a self-contained C program, but I got tired of writing buggy and limited asset import/export code, so eventually I put together a minimal public C API [2] that I then wrapped with CPython bindings [3] and some additional python code [4] to expose a more 'pythonic' API. It's all still a WIP, but it has already allowed me to write a Blender plugin [5], so now I can play around with my renderer directly in Blender, and test with more complex scenes others have made.
Fun project, and it's really cool to see my little renderer in the interactive viewport in Blender, but I have also learned that I don't particularly enjoy working with non-trivial amounts of Python code.
[1] https://github.com/vkoskiv/c-ray [2] https://github.com/vkoskiv/c-ray/blob/51a742b2ee4d0b570975cd... [3] https://github.com/vkoskiv/c-ray/tree/51a742b2ee4d0b570975cd... [4] https://github.com/vkoskiv/c-ray/tree/51a742b2ee4d0b570975cd... [5] https://github.com/vkoskiv/c-ray/tree/51a742b2ee4d0b570975cd...
For many apps the main source of memory usage isn't stack or heap memory consumed during runtime, it's the loading of the binary itself into memory. I've seen some wild app binary sizes (200MB+ for relatively modest apps without that much functionality).
One thing that's endlessly frustrating about mobile dev is that the vast majority of devs are thoughtless about dependencies, how they are built/linked, and how that impacts memory use. Far and away the dominant mode of dependencies in mobile-land is just "statically link it and forget about it".
This is the singular biggest contributor to app size bloat, and pretty up there for runtime memory consumption as well.
A double whammy here is that modern iOS apps are actually multiple binaries (main app, watch extensions, widget extensions, etc.), and if you heavily use static linking you're carrying multiple copies of the bloat.
A few actionable things:
- Be very, very judicious about taking on new dependencies. Is a library offering enough value and marginal functionality to be worth the weight? (e.g., I don't think AFNetworking in 2025 meets the bar for the vast majority of people, but yet it's still everywhere?)
- Dynamically link, especially if you're a complex app with multiple targets.
- Deadstrip aggressively. I cannot emphasize this enough. The default compiler settings will not deadstrip unused public symbols in static libraries. Fix this.
Does iOS not do demand paging?