Native CLI size and behavior

Native-image optimization is gated by an end-to-end executable workflow, not only --help. The smoke test covers physical init/discovery, status, add, commit, history, branch checkout materialization, nested -C, and failure atomicity for an unsupported mutating option.

2026-07-17 baseline and first reduction

The previous stripped Linux executable was 141,429,072 bytes (about 135 MiB):

ELF area	Bytes
.text	52,689,753
.svm_heap	56,360,960
.rela.dyn	31,972,224

The old clj.native-image wrapper also placed its own Maven, AWS SDK, JGit, JNA, ClojureScript, and Closure Compiler dependencies on GraalVM's analysis classpath. Geschichte now AOT-compiles with a build-only namespace and passes a separately resolved runtime classpath to native-image. JVM-only native aliases exclude Datahike/Konserve's CLJS backend dependencies. GraalVM size optimization is enabled with -Os.

The resulting executable is 106,957,136 bytes (about 102 MiB):

ELF area	Bytes	Change
.text	21,946,137	-58%
.svm_heap	52,232,192	-7%
.rela.dyn	32,419,920	+1%

On the measurement host, ges --help starts in about 40 ms with 61 MiB peak RSS and a clean physical status in about 60 ms with 73 MiB peak RSS.

Remaining size frontier

GraalVM reports roughly 21.75 MiB of code, 52.23 MiB of image heap, and 39.15 MiB of other data. The largest application origins include Clojure, Datahike, Datahike query execution, Konserve/tiered storage, Jackson, Java HTTP, and Malli. The image contains about 24,500 reachable types and 99,200 reachable methods.

The next useful experiments therefore belong mostly upstream in Datahike:

1. expose a minimal, manually defined runtime API instead of eagerly loading the generated full API/specification surface;
2. move Malli/specification and optional HTTP/JSON dependencies out of minimal embedded profiles;
3. replace open requiring-resolve paths with explicit native registries for query functions, transaction functions, stores, indices, and serializers;
4. split standing replication/network service code into an optional gesd process if delayed loading cannot keep it out of the one-shot CLI;
5. compare the full Datalog command with a VCS-only image before deciding whether two distributed binaries are worth the interface cost.

Compression can be evaluated for release artifacts afterward, but it does not reduce reachable code, runtime RSS, or image-heap initialization.