Re: Downloaded Bloodshed devcpp, compiled the Hello example but the exe is half a megabyte!?

From:
 James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Wed, 31 Oct 2007 11:40:58 -0000
Message-ID:
<1193830858.674102.154880@v3g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>
On Oct 31, 12:57 am, Kai-Uwe Bux <jkherci...@gmx.net> wrote:

Dave -Turner wrote:

And YES, I have read the FAQs. They were helpful to some degree - my 50=

0kb

executable is now only 268kb.
But that is still ridiculously bloated for a "Hello world" console
program. And yes, I do have "-s" (ie. "Strip Executable") setting, and =

no

I do not have any debug info included. And yes, I do have "Best
Optimization" setting on. I've gone through all the compiler and linker
settings but can't see anything that would be bloating it out like this.


If I just compile (no optimization, no fancy options) hello
world with g++ under Linux, I get an executable of size 8K. If
I strip it, it becomes 6K. If I include debug info, it grows
to 55K. The only way I can really bloat it is by linking
statically.


It's even smaller on my Solaris Sparc platform: 7.5KB and 5KB.
But the resulting program won't run unless g++ has been
installed, and the user has set up his path (particularly
LD_LIBRARY_PATH) to use it. To get a generally usable
executable under Solaris, you have to use the option
-static-libgcc (or bundle libstdc++.so with your delivery, and
install it somewhere your program knows about). With the result
that the executable size jumps to almost 100KB. (The situation
is different with Linux, since g++/gcc is "bundled", at least
with the distributions I've seen, and libstdc++.so is installed
in one of the places the system looks by default. I'd still use
-static-libgcc, however, in order to be sure that I got the
right version of the library---the one I'd compiled and linked
against.)

If I specify -static (so that all of the libraries are
statically linked), the executable size shoots up to 3MB---even
more than the OP is seeing. This is not recommended, however,
since by doing this, the program is only executable under the
version of Solaris installed on the machine where I linked (2.8,
in my case); if I allow the compiler to link the system
libraries dynamically, however, it is guaranteed to run on later
versions, and is likely to run on some earlier versions (2.7) as
well.

Which brings me back to my original point: there are more
important issues to be considered than the size of the
executable file.

--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
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