Discussion: IDEs and large module sizes

[rasta-mouse]

I'm raising this more as a discussion point, rather than a bug. There are several namespaces within the metadata that are so large that IDEs struggle to handle intellisense and code analysis for them. Although workarounds are possible within the IDEs, I wanted to open a discussion around the possibility of partitioning some of the larger ones, as suggested by @kennykerr.

Some related issues for reference:

• Not find windows::Win32::System::Diagnostics::Debug::IMAGE_OPTIONAL_HEADER64 windows-rs#2368
• Modules with large mod.rs files are not recognized as modules intellij-rust/intellij-rust#9680

[mikebattista]

Which namespaces are problematic?

[riverar]

Or is IntelliJ's default of ~2.5MB just too low? Seems the community runs into this a lot https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=idea.max.intellisense.filesize

[kennykerr]

There are only a small handful of modules that end up over 2.5MB. These are the worst offenders:

• Windows.Win32.Media.DirectShow
• Windows.Win32.Media.MediaFoundation
• Windows.Win32.System.Diagnostics.Debug
• Windows.Win32.UI.Shell

[rasta-mouse]

@riverar Yeah, perhaps. I don't know if the same issue extends to other IDEs or if it's just JetBrains. As I said, I just raised it as a discussion. If the general consensus is that it's not worth it or too much work to address at this level, then I'm totally cool with that.

[mikebattista]

What would be helpful is if you could go through the headers in those namespaces (below) and suggest how they should be split up.

DirectShow
https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata/blob/main/generation/WinSDK/Partitions/Media.DShow/settings.rsp
https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata/blob/main/generation/WinSDK/Partitions/MsTv/settings.rsp

MediaFoundation
https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata/blob/main/generation/WinSDK/Partitions/Mf/settings.rsp

Debug
https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata/blob/main/generation/WinSDK/Partitions/Debug/settings.rsp
https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata/blob/main/generation/WinSDK/Partitions/DebuggerExtensions/settings.rsp

Shell
https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata/blob/main/generation/WinSDK/Partitions/Shell/settings.rsp

[mikebattista]

We could move the MsTv partition to Windows.Win32.Media.DirectShow.Tv.

[kennykerr]

Windows.Win32.System.Diagnostics.Debug is currently the most problematic as it comes up quite often and is just huge. The few headers included in that namespace are all very big. Could we experiment with putting each into its own sub namespace?

[mikebattista]

I could see moving the 2 debugger extension headers to a .Extensions subnamespace. I'll start with that for the next release.

[kennykerr]

That namespace also contains IActiveScript and friends. Those aren't even Windows APIs.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.visualstudio.debugger.interop?view=visualstudiosdk-2019

Can we move those out of Debug as well?

[mikebattista]

There's another partition in Debug that I missed earlier.

https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata/blob/main/generation/WinSDK/Partitions/Debug/settings.rsp

I think the APIs you're talking about are coming from all the activ* headers. Are you saying we should just exclude those?

[mikebattista]

I don't know if the VS APIs you linked are the same, these seem to be related to Windows Script Host. In any case, I could move all those activ* headers to an .ActiveScript subnamespace.

[kennykerr]

Sounds good.

[mikebattista]

Debug and DirectShow have been refactored. The others will require some domain expertise to tease apart if at all, so I will leave them alone for now.

Closing for now as it sounds like the most problematic issues have been addressed. Feel free to reactivate if the changes aren't enough or you have more concrete feedback on the other namespaces.