Is there any way to make the R + shiny build smaller, so as to make it more light weight when deploying shiny apps? (or plumber API's, or any other R processes for that matter?)
Background
I have been deploying shiny apps in kubernetes and the builds are quite a lot larger than similar apps written in other languages (e.g. python).
I've also deployed some to heroku, and they're also quite large builds (in the hundreds of MB, whereas other similar apps in other languages might only be a few tens of MB).
What I know so far
I know base R is quite large, but packages are the bulk of the build size, so I have reduced those as much as possible by not importing anything unnecessary, and extracting some functions from their packages so as to not have to include the whole thing.