[LLVMdev] Which is more compact, .bc or .ll.gz? And what might be even more compact?

[Edmund Grimley-Evans]

According to the few tests I did, .ll.gz is more compact:

1.00  LLVM bitcode (.bc)
0.80  Gzipped LLVM bitcode (.bc.gz)
4.13  LLVM assembly (.ll)
0.68  Gzipped LLVM assembly (.ll.gz)

However, there's not much in it, considering that a stripped native binary is about 0.40 on the same scale.

So, seeing as projects such as PNaCl want to send LLVM bitcode over the network, are there any proposed solutions for making LLVM bitcode more compact?

Removing or simplifying the names of local variables would be an obvious thing to do. Is there anything else that could be done without changing the bitcode format? (There's an obvious analogy with JavaScript compression techniques.) Does anyone have any idea how much it would help?

Edmund
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