Why we need compression
The size of binary may not be the issue in today's use cases but, we may need this in cases like running your app on raspberry pi.
By default, go includes some information in binaries that can be omitted.
Ultimately, a Go binary can be compressed to 1/4th of its actual size.
To know, how this works, you can read an excellent article here
The following table summarizes the compression with different combinations of go commands and UPX on a 64bit Windows machine. However the compression increases startup time for your app
| Command | Size | Compression ratio |
|---|---|---|
| go build | 14.2 MB (14,905,856 bytes) | 100.00 |
| go build -ldflags="-w" | 11.3 MB (11,938,304 bytes) | 79.57 |
| go build -ldflags="-s" | 10.5 MB (11,089,408 bytes) | 73.94 |
| go build -ldflags="-s -w" | 10.5 MB (11,089,408 bytes) | 73.94 |
| go build / upx -1 -k fileName.exe | 8.23 MB (8,631,808 bytes) | 57.95 |
| go build / upx -9 -k fileName.exe | 6.67 MB (7,000,064 bytes) | 46.97 |
| go build -ldflags="-s" / upx -1 -k fileName.exe | 4.87 MB (5,116,416 bytes) | 34.29 |
| go build -ldflags="-s" / upx -9 -k fileName.exe | 3.42 MB (3,591,680 bytes) | 24.08 |
You can refer to the following link for source code
https://github.com/akshaybharambe14/golang-examples/tree/master/binaryCompression
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