[mraleph]

[I work on Dart VM team]

`dart2native` just concatenates two binaries together: AOT runtime binary and AOT snapshot binary. AOT snapshot is an ELF binary which contains native code generated from your original Dart code.

The approach is not pretty but was chosen as an implementation shortcut.

That's why `strip` does not actually do good things to the binary.

There is no reason to run `strip` on such binaries - because they don't contain anything strippable.

[silisili]

Thanks. Also noting that upx has the same behavior.

I didn't inspect the binaries, just try to see how/if they compress.

[mraleph]

We are planning to fix it some time in the future, we really only expected moderate usage of `dart2native` and only on Linux. Turns out that there is demand for using it all over the place, which includes Mac and Windows and requires things like signing support... And to make executable signable we need to make them real Mach-O / PE executables and not weird concatenations of bytes.