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Todd Sundsted posted Mar 18, 2023
the crystal programming language always inlines blocks, which is great for performance but trades off space for speed. using blocks effectively means keeping this in mind.
somewhere along the line, i learned the habit of passing a block to a function as a means of customizing the behavior of the function. if the function that takes the block is large, it's important to remember that the body of the function is inlined where the function is called, which may not be what you are expecting. if you call the function multiple times, you even get multiple copies.
i just committed code that fixes an egregious example of this problem. in this case these ~30 lines of code replace the blocks with procs (which aren't inlined) and cut ~24mb (that's megabytes) off the executable (over a third of its size).
i regularly shoot myself in the foot trying to be clever, so i don' t know how prevalent this problem is in practice, but it's definitely something to keep in mind, especially if you see compile times and executable sizes growing!