Tree Shaking Issue with Converter Registration

[shtse8]

Hi,

First of all, thank you for this great project!

I have a question regarding the tree shaking capabilities in Dart when using your library. In the initialiseDogs method, all converters are registered as follows:

Future initialiseDogs() async {
  var engine = DogEngine.hasValidInstance ? DogEngine.instance : DogEngine();
  engine.registerAllConverters([gen0.UserConverter()]);
  engine.setSingleton();
}

My understanding is that by registering all converters this way, the Dart optimizer might be unable to tree shake unused dataclasses. Since the converters require the dataclass as a generic parameter, it seems that the dataclass itself will be included in the final build, even if it is unused. This could potentially increase the bundle size.

Could you please clarify if my understanding is correct? Is there any way to ensure that only the used dataclasses and their respective converters are included in the final build, allowing the optimizer to effectively tree shake the unused ones?

Thank you in advance for your response!

[helightdev]

Hi,

Sorry for answering this late, for some reason I didn't get a notification for this issue.

Your assumptions about the tree shaking not being applied to generated classes and unused datatypes is currently correct.

Currently all converters are collected and registered for the entire app, one way to possibly solve this issue with the current feature set would be to basically do the tree shaking by hand by effectively initializing the dogs engine without the autogenerated method and only registering the converters you actually want to use.

An other option would be to group types in companion packages, if you do not some types yet, you can just not use / register the package and therefore the converters would get tree shook.

Determining if a converter is going to be used is a bit complicated, especially with how the system is currently designed. The quality of life imports and no part file make it quite hard to find dead converters. When the macro feature gets released, I will try making the project compatible with tree shaking.