CoreRT and MessagePack - Real World Example

While the benchmarks I recently posted showed a lot of promise for combining MessagePack C# with CoreRT, I wanted to run it with a real world example to confirm that this is worth the effort, so this evening I updated Last 'n Furious, now available on itch.io.

The original version was 97MB, which zipped down to 41MB.  The second iteration - using ReadyToRun, PublishTrimmed and Warp as detailed here - came to 32MB.  The new CoreRT version is 45MB which zips down to just 16MB, so we have halved the size.

Where previously I'd been happy to get in-game in about a second, the CoreRT version now shows the main menu screen in half that time.  It feels snappy like a native executable.  The improvements can be clearly seen side-by-side:

As always, there's more work to be done to integrate MessagePack fully into XAGE's pipeline, but the results already justify the effort involved.